The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity

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The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity

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The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity BY JOHN A. OCHOA

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2004 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ochoa, John A. (John Andres), 1967– The uses of failure in Mexican literature and identity / by John A. Ochoa. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-292-70573-5 ((cl.) : alk. paper) 1. Mexican prose literature—History and criticism. 2. Failure (Psychology) in literature. 3. National characteristics, Mexican, in literature. 4. Literature and history—Mexico. 5. Mexico—Historiography. I. Title. PQ7207.N37034 2005 860.9'353—dc22 2004002879

For Josephine Wood de Ochoa during her years in a Mexico that didn’t last and, naturally, for Stacy


Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

The Broken Monument, or Failure as a Source of Knowledge 1

INTRODUCTION.

PART 1. THE CONQUEST: ‘‘THE PAPER WARRIOR’’ AT THE SOURCE

19

CHAPTER 1. Education and Entropy in Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s War to Stop Time 21

PART 2. VISIONS OF A NEW NATION

47

CHAPTER 2. Compromised Free Markets in El Periquillo Sarniento: Teachers, Albureros, and Other Shouters 49

Alexander von Humboldt’s Work on Mexico, Cultural Allegory, and the Limits of Vision 81 CHAPTER 3.

PART 3. THE REVOLUTION OF 1910 CHAPTER 4.

111

José Vasconcelos and the Necessities of Failure

113

PART 4. AT THE LIMITS: THE 1960S AND THE BORDER CHAPTER 5. The Threats of Collapse in Cambio de piel (or Fuentes the Frail) 143

141

CHAPTER 6. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Bordering on Madness and Performing Liminality 165

CONCLUSION.

Notes

General Santa Anna’s Leg and Other Failings

195

Works Cited Index

viii

186

219

233

FAILURE IN MEXICAN LITERATURE AND IDENTITY

Acknowledgments

This book and I are both beholden to some impressive mentors, colleagues, and friends. Andrew Bush has been an ideal reader and a consistent guiding spirit since my undergraduate days; Vera Kutzinski’s honesty and thoroughness were both forbidding and necessary; Roberto González Echevarría provided deep guidance, especially through the example of his works (this project is a field-test of several of his theories); and Raymond L.Williams has offered a tireless example of how to do and be. I am also deeply grateful to Ernesto Livon Grosman, Christopher Bolton, Catharine Wall, and Ben and Linda Kleindorfer for listening and prodding. All of the above read or heard most of what I have to say and guided my thoughts in ways more important than they perhaps realize. They have become a chorus in my head, and I hope I do them justice. Since this book attempts to cover such a broad range of periods and subjects, I took to heart Alfonso Reyes’s dictum ‘‘entre todos lo sabemos todo’’ and reached out to others more knowledgeable than I. Some generous readers were instrumental in shaping individual chapters: Beni Trigo and Julio Ortega on Gómez-Peña; Elzbieta Sklodowska on Vasconcelos; Lois Parkinson Zamora on Fuentes and the Neobaroque. Andy Bush wisely sent me back to the drawing board on Lizardi, which luckily coincided with a working group at the University of California, Riverside Center for Ideas and Society, where I benefited especially from the insights of Katherine Kinney and Steven Gould Axelrod. Sandra Comas Ferdman read and commented on early versions of the chapter on Bernal Díaz. Some generous Germanists and Humboldtists forgave and aided my incursion into their field: Nicholas Rennie, Jeffrey Sammons, Graham Burnett, Stuart Peterfreund, and Gretchen Hachmeister (who also provided moral support and wedding cake). David Quint, Vilashini Cooppan, Pericles Lewis, and Anita Gallers read early drafts and offered helpful suggestions for improvement. The comments of Nina Gerassi-Navarro and an anonymous reader at the Uni-

versity of Texas Press were thorough, fair, and deeply useful. I also appreciate permission from the publishers of Foucault in Latin America (2002, reproduced by permission of Routledge, Inc., part of The Taylor & Francis Group), MLN, and the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (St. Louis), where some of this work appeared in earlier forms; thanks to Theresa May, Allison Faust, and Leslie Tingle at UT Press and Kathy Lewis for their thoroughness. The material demands of this project were unusually well met. Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, Ray Williams, and Nicolas Shumway carried out baroque, behind-the-scenes efforts on its behalf. For daily sustenance I am deeply thankful to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Riverside, the Dorothy Danforth-Compton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the University of California Academic Senate, the UC Institute for Mexico and the United States, and the UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society. From them I received, respectively, a job and the permission to leave it for a while; fellowships; grants; and time. The Interlibrary Loan office at Rivera Library fielded my aggressive requests with humor and efficiency; my colleagues in the Department of Hispanic Studies at UCR offered years of productive collegiality, and two graduate student assistants in the department, Shannon Polchow and Rose Dutra, were instrumental in getting things done well and on time. The happy arrival of two sons, John Jr. and Pablo Eduardo, kept the entire notion of failure in perspective. Thanks, too, to Julia Zaragoza for maintaining order. Finally, this project owes the most to Stacy Andersen, whose approval has meant the world to me.Throughout she has been my favorite interlocutor and muse but most importantly my friend.

x


The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity


INTRODUCTION

The Broken Monument, or Failure as a Source of Knowledge

Desde la oficina, Robles veía los techos feos, las azoteas desgarbadas . . . —No es fácil cercenarse de este pueblo. Derrotados, todos derrotados para siempre. (192) [From his office, Robles observed the ugly roofs, the uncouth flat thatches . . . ‘‘It’s not easy to pare oneself from these people. Defeated, all defeated forever.’’] 1 —CARLOS FUENTES, LA REGIÓN MÁS TRANSPARENTE (1958)

En cierto sentido la historia de México, como la de cada Mexicano, consiste en una lucha entre las formas y las fórmulas en que se pretende encerrar a nuestro ser y las explosiones con que nuestra espontaneidad se venga . . . Palabras malditas . . . sólo pronunciamos en voz alta cuando no somos dueños de nosotros mismos . . . Chingar . . . implica la idea del fracaso. (29, 67, 69) [In a certain sense the history of Mexico, like that of every Mexican, is a struggle between the forms and formulas that have been imposed on us and the explosions with which our individuality avenges itself . . . Evil word[s] . . . we utter only when we are not in control of ourselves . . . Chingar . . . implies the idea of failure.] (33, 74, 77) —OCTAVIO PAZ, EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950)

Carlos Fuentes offers the following generalization about Mexican history: ‘‘The history of Mexico was a history of crushing defeats . . . Miguel Hidalgo, the father of Mexican independence, ended up with his head on exhibit on a lance at the city gates of Chihuahua. Imagine George and Martha beheaded at Mount Vernon’’ (Myself, 4, 5). None of the major historical events to which the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman used to refer as ‘‘los pilares de nuestro estar’’ [the pillars

of our being]—the Spanish Conquest, the War of Independence, the War of 1846, the Reforma and the French Invasion, and the Revolution of 1910—are clear-cut successes.2 At best, they were failures threaded with success; at worst they were outright disasters, Fuentes’s ‘‘crushing defeats.’’ Each of the texts in this study is reconsidered within the context of these historical ‘‘pillars of our being.’’ The subject of the first chapter, Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632), is not only the best-known account of the Conquest but also the foundational epic of both Mexico and Latin America. The second figure I examine, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, was the author of the first Latin American novel, the picaresque El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), and survivor—barely—of the ravages of the Wars of Independence from Spain. Alexander von Humboldt’s works of descriptive and travel literature, the subject of Chapter 3, appeared at the cusp of two significant and interrelated historical developments: Romanticism and Mexican Independence. A long-standing tradition credits Humboldt with promoting Independence by providing it with Enlightenment ideas, a charged proposition which we will reconsider. Chapter 4 concerns José Vasconcelos, a key figure during the Revolution of 1910–1920. The Revolution placed Mexico in dire need of reinvention and gave Vasconcelos the rare opportunity to influence that process—and to fail at it. Chapter 5 concerns Fuentes’s 1967 novel Cambio de piel, which is engaged with a different revolution—the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s—with equally mixed results. The sixth chapter is on Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a contemporary performance artist who operates under the sign of the most recent trauma of Mexican history— the massive exodus of Mexicans into the United States—with bordercrossing as a master trope in his brand of art. To refer to the ‘‘Mexican nation’’ within such a long historical view means taking chronological and categorical liberties. In the strictest historical sense, Mexico as a nation is tied to modernity and is a political and administrative product of the late eighteenth century, as much the offspring of the French Revolution as it is of the postcolonial Spanish Empire. The historical moment of the creation of Mexico as a nation—roughly 1810–1820—is at the chronological center of this study, but there are glances both backward and forward in order to establish a more nuanced continuity.3 With this moment of creation in sight, the theoretical stage is set by Benedict Anderson’s observation that a sense of nationhood is a cul2


tural product as deliberately composed—and as legible—as any text.4 This, of course, is a refinement of a point argued most convincingly by Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson, who demonstrate that the power structures of literary form often reflect the structures of political and social power. To this I add that a sense of nationhood, the simultaneous ‘‘imagined community,’’ occasionally meets with failure, as do all systems of signification and praxis. When we consider the imagined community of Mexico (the Mexico of the mind, to paraphrase Antonin Artaud) from Independence on, it is crucial to remember Octavio Paz’s dictum in El laberinto de la soledad: ‘‘para nosotros un realista siempre es un pesimista’’ (20) [to us a realist is always a pessimist] (22). Anderson, following Benjamin, argues that the rise of the modern nation-state was tied to a change in the perception of time: during the preindustrial age, time had been ‘‘messianic,’’ imbued with the sense that it would someday end. With industrialization, literacy, and print capitalism, the notion of time became perpetual, ‘‘homogenous, [and] empty’’ and ‘‘marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment’’ but by a belief in endlessness, in a stream of coincidences ‘‘measured by clock and calendar’’ (24). Whatever changes in the sense of chronology may have occurred in European and some North American nations because of industrialization, Mexico seems to have stayed in the older, preindustrial model: its sense of itself is punctuated by moments of apocalyptic calamity, more reminiscent of tumultuous premodernity than of the steady modernity postulated by Anderson.5 Mexico’s history is riddled with the knowledge, and expectation, of the ‘‘crushing defeats’’ that have plagued it regularly from the beginning. The horizons of the entire span of Mexican history and reality are clearly bounded by the presence of those conflicted ‘‘pillars of our being’’: the Conquest, Independence, the American War of 1848, the Revolution of 1910, and the massive immigration of the last few decades are the sources for Paz’s realistic pessimism. These humbling historical events—but most importantly their complicated after-effects inscribed in the literature and the identity of a nation—are what we will explore here. Of course the question of identity has been a constant and nervous obsession since the start of all Latin American thought—from Christopher Columbus’s struggles with how to describe the new continent all the way to the ‘‘discurso americanista’’ [Americanist discourse] of the twentieth century, with many stops in between. ‘‘Remove the concept of . . . national identity from the language of Latin American literature,’’ as Roberto González Echevarría notes, ‘‘and that literature becomes INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

3

nearly silent’’ (Voice, 8). Deep within this preoccupation with ontology and with autochthonous culture lurks the dark specter of failure. What is distinct about the case of Mexico is that—since failure is threaded throughout its national pillars—failure itself has achieved a monumental standing. Each of the texts, figures, and periods that I revisit here is a monument of sorts. They all hold a place of importance within the Mexican canon (except for Gómez-Peña—at least not yet). It is quite startling then to find within these metonymical objects of national pride, in these symbols culled from the pantheon, an intimate relationship to failure. In many cases these works themselves chronicle the moment of failure directly, by giving an account of the historical disasters of their periods; but each of them, I argue, is itself a resonant failure on some level: from Bernal Díaz’s Oedipal war with what he perceives as the authorities both literary and bureaucratic; to Humboldt’s attempts to understand absolutely everything about other cultures; to Lizardi’s attempts to rein in the chaos of street life circa 1800; to Vasconcelos’s Platonism meant for illiterate paisanos; and most recently to Fuentes’s flirtation with monumental instability and Gómez-Peña’s attempts to embody the traumatic essence of the border crossing. Failure, as I characterize it here, is a form of knowledge. In this sense it resonates with recent critical thought, especially poststructuralist preoccupation with semantic fragmentation and the free-play of meaning associated with deterritorialization. Some theorists like Néstor García Canclini and Roger Bartra have considered the relationship of Latin America to postmodernism and have concentrated on the failure of categories of knowledge. Bartra, for instance, follows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s critique of the Western obsession with the Oedipal complex in his own unmasking of the search for ‘‘mexicanidad’’ (the hobby-horse of twentieth-century Mexican thought). Bartra claims that from Samuel Ramos onward the thinkers of ‘‘mexicanidad’’ have been obsessed with pessimism.6 He argues that their critical stances have been compromised by a need to see a paralyzing, ‘‘melancholic’’ schizophrenia. Néstor García Canclini similarly questions the academic differentiation between high and low culture, finding this disciplinary distinction inadequate. In effect he accuses the intellectual establishment of epistemological failure in its attempt to explore Latin American modernity. According to García Canclini, simplistic distinctions between high and low fail to account for the shades of in-betweenness, for the fundamental hybridity of form and function that defines mod4


ern cultural production and modes of representation. He theorizes this failure as a useful incompleteness that renders impossible any sort of totalizing or even unifying vision. Unlike Bartra, who sees epistemological failures as an obstacle, García Canclini considers failure useful precisely because of its unsettling and potentially reformist possibilities: he proposes, by way of solution, a hybrid methodology. García Canclini’s answer, an extension of late Marxist analysis via Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams, calls for a breakdown of disciplinary and epistemological walls in the hope that the resulting eclectic analysis will conform to the shape of the fragmented object of study and that the subaltern will thus be able to speak through the cracks.7 I sympathize with García Canclini’s attempts to rescue failure and to recast it as a useful and destabilizing critical tool: failures are often more revealing than triumphs. Harold Bloom points out that John Milton’s God is perfect, yet later poets who were influenced by Milton— William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley—were much more drawn to God’s failed nemesis Satan, because he is an interesting failure, more interesting even than God (Ringers in the Tower, 19). In a structural or even geological sense, a failure is a fissure, a crack that at once defines and reveals weakness and threatens the larger structure. Failures are faults. They can indeed threaten, alarm, and be used to assign blame; but they can also be deeply useful. They afford the opportunity of laying bare the seams, the unseen continuities of form and of history. The collapse of an idea, a system, or even of a simple plan often forces a mode of self-examination and of explanation. This mode can often lead to renovation and on occasion even to novelty. To take a familiar example from conventional literary history, countless pages have been devoted to arguing that Don Quijote is a failed chivalric romance (or a stunted pastoral tale or a mannered Lucianic satire); and that because of these failures Don Quijote must be considered something entirely new: the first example of another form—the modern novel—that reflects a new sensibility and a new world vision. The downfall of old forms necessitates improvisation with the ruined parts. Thus the reading I set forth here is of an epistemological event of failure as a ‘‘heuristic’’ event: a transitional, possibly destructive, moment that precipitates new knowledge. We should recall that ‘‘failure’’ is also etymologically related to a fall (the Latin cadere means both ‘‘to fail’’ and ‘‘to fall’’), a homology rich with conflated meanings. The Fall in the biblical sense is a fall into knowledge. Paul de Man, interested in both falls into knowledge and the failures of systems of signification, INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

5

notes that one laughs at oneself after stumbling because, to use Charles Baudelaire’s term, there is a dédoublement, a sudden escape from one’s conception of oneself. Dédoublement can result from tripping in public, from seeing oneself in a mirror, or from realizing that one’s fencing strategy is being matched too well by an opponent: each of these unexpected situations forces a reconsideration of one’s concept of oneself (Blindness, 211–215). Yet, however optimistic a reading is assigned to failure, I recognize that exploring an entire nation’s shortcomings promises to be a thorny proposition. I am well aware that dwelling upon failure raises the ugly possibility of falling into the same pessimistic trap exposed by Bartra. Worse yet, a sustained consideration of failure, especially if tied to national identity, runs the risk of political bad faith by producing an inadvertent apology for colonialism and neocolonialism. Instead, I wish to dwell upon the strengthening results of failure. I explore this phenomenon as a contingency, as a survival tactic, and most importantly (as my title suggests) as a useful tool: I see it as an unusual means toward self-knowledge. The failures I observe in these varied texts, and by extension the historical moments to which they are connected, share a very specific trait. ‘‘Heuristic’’ failure contrasts to what I would call ‘‘systemic’’ failure. By the latter I mean the tragic realities of what sociologist Pablo González Casanova has called the ‘‘internal colonialism’’ of Latin America. This long—and warranted—cry of pain just in this century has generated a powerful discourse of disillusion and a concomitant literature. This ‘‘literatura del subdesarrollo’’ [literature of underdevelopment], whose main aim is to explain the shortcomings of an initial moment of promise, includes such notable examples as the pessimistic, searching essays by the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui and the Argentinean Ezequiel Martínez Estrada; the Mexican ‘‘novela de la Revolución’’ [novel of the Revolution], which chronicles the degradation of the ideals of the 1910 Revolution; and the more recent journalistic genre of testimonio, which bears witness to the horrors of atavistic social ills and abuses of power.8 In contrast to the sense of fundamental disillusion driving what I am calling ‘‘systemic’’ failure, the type of ‘‘heuristic’’ failure I concentrate upon is neither systemic nor terminal: it is not post-traumatic testimony seeking to disinter the past in order to explain the ruination of the present. Rather, the texts I have gathered here contain the precise moment of failure, and not necessarily its long aftermath or its recon6


struction in hindsight. These texts, as it were, are surprised by their own failure. In the language of phenomenology, they are caught in the singular event. To be sure, the failures within them have proven to be momentous and far reaching and even offer a kind of testimonio themselves: Bernal Díaz witnesses (and participates in) the destruction of entire worlds, including his own; if nothing else, José Vasconcelos’s Memorias is a Rousseauan survivor’s confessional; Gómez-Peña seeks to speak for millions of undocumented immigrants in their traumatic journey north. But these texts, because of their proximity to the moment of collapse they witness as well as the textual failures within them, display a heightened moment of knowledge, a flash of insight much like de Man’s dédoublement. This is a moment of epiphanic self-awareness as much about itself as about the world crashing down around the subject. This event, as de Man points out, is a fragile conversion, a momentary reckoning that is ephemeral and cannot last. Unlike, for instance, the long-lasting and long-suffering relationship between the promise of the Revolution of 1910 and the disillusioned literature (the ‘‘novela de la Revolución’’) that it spawned, the heuristic failure I explore here is both contained and unexpected; so it cannot easily generate (or form part of) a well-defined continuity or a tradition. These works, and their definitory moments, are sui generis. By definition epiphanic falls into knowledge are momentary and can never be repeated—at least not on purpose. Yet, despite their evanescent uniqueness, these texts and historical figures have become paradoxically monumental. Even what I am calling heuristic failure does have a long-lasting and persistent weightiness: ruined monuments in spite of their ruination are monuments nonetheless, and even useful ones at that, because they offer a perspective on the development of a unique form of national identity. Ernest Renan’s classic essay on the subject, ‘‘What Is a Nation?’’ (1882), tried to answer the enormous question of his title in terms of memory: ‘‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation’’ (Poetry, 11). Obscuring the facts, glossing over less-than-noble origins, and even inventing new ones are all a crucial part of constructing a seamless sense of nationhood. Although this observation is generally true, certain kinds of traumatic events and the history that accounts for those events offer a radical exception to Renan’s formula: Fuentes’s ‘‘crushing defeats.’’ Some failures cannot be forgotten, for their weight and their aftermath are INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

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simply too great to sublimate. This kind of failure creates the kind of painful self-awareness that either cannot or will not be driven to the unconscious. Some fifty years after Renan, Sigmund Freud proposed a similar idea in Moses and Monotheism (1939). According to Freud, the Israelites tried to suppress the fact that Moses, their founding father, was actually a failure who was murdered in the desert by his own disillusioned people. It was only much later that his memory was reclaimed and he was recast as a founding father. Freud points to the fact that some traumatic failures are so burdensome that they simply cannot be successfully driven underground and forgotten. When people gain identity by means of an incompletely suppressed trauma, their collective unconscious will naturally suffer from a damaging collective neurosis. As Cathy Caruth has noted, history—as it is akin to witnessing—becomes quite difficult in the aftermath of trauma (‘‘Unclaimed Experience’’). Being what it is, historical trauma virtually requires revisionism and glossing over. And Mexican history, like many others, has on occasion tried to reclaim its traumas or to reinvent them in a more positive light.9 But no attempt at semantic control over the national psyche has ever been strong enough to suppress the deeply ambivalent nature of the ‘‘pillars of our being’’ altogether. As Paz alerts us, Mexican reality is simply too massive, too crushing to hide. Even the most repressive and artificially optimistic periods, like the pax augusta of the dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), saw the flowering of a darkly subversive popular culture, like the joyfully macabre lithography of José Guadalupe Posada or the aggressively lewd humor found in populist opposition periodicals like El Ahuizote and La Avispa. The invocation of Paz in order to understand this deeply ingrained dualism of the Mexican psyche is significant. I do not quite agree with Bartra’s assessment that Paz falls prey to the same melancholic trap as the other thinkers on ‘‘mexicanidad.’’ Instead I read Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad as a manifesto on how to negotiate between the negative and positive aspects of failure: his influential essay is nearly weighed down with the threat of existentialist pessimism, but somehow it manages to escape it. True to its 1950s context, Paz’s work is awash with a tragic sense of life quite French in flavor. It is both a belated study and a departure from the search for ‘‘mexicanidad.’’ Paz’s worldview is driven by a fundamental dualism—the notion that Mexicans are rent in two and that they are illegitimate products of a transgression, ‘‘hijos de la chingada.’’ One implication of Paz’s study is that the Mexican 8


mind, trapped in a relentless oscillation between silence and effusion, is doomed to remain hermetic and alone: El Mexicano no transciende su soledad. Al contrario, se encierra en ella. Habitamos nuestra soledad como Filoctetes su isla, no esperando, sino temiendo volver al mundo. No soportamos la presencia de nuestros compañeros. Encerrados en nosotros mismos, cuando no desgarrados y enajenados. (58) [The Mexican does not transcend his solitude. On the contrary, he locks himself up in it. We live in our solitude like Philoctetes on his island, fearing rather than hoping to return to the world. We cannot bear the presence of our companions. We hide within ourselves, except when we rend ourselves open in our frenzy.] (64)

In his attempts to isolate Mexican character and to diagnose a national illness, Paz inherits an old line of inquiry with roots that extend at least as far back as the seventeenth century. This line uses technical concepts from science and natural history in order to analyze social ills but ultimately seems to account for America’s ‘‘underdevelopment’’ by contrasting it to Europe. By the nineteenth century, this strain of thought applied positivist evolutionary models of progress and developed a form of conflicted, self-flagellating neo-colonialism. As Martin Stabb has shown, this scientistic impulse amounted to an insecure and pessimistic pathology with regard to native culture (In Quest, 12–33).10 Its proponents—like the Domingo Faustino Sarmiento of Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América (1883), Carlos Octavio Bunge in Nuestra América (1903), and Alcides Arguedas in Pueblo enfermo (1909), among many—blamed the ‘‘sickness’’ of America (in contrast to a healthy Europe) on everything from racial miscegenation to the unusual weather, the flora, the fauna, and the diet. It is true that we can read Paz along these same lines, whereby he simply substitutes a newer kind of scientistic diagnosis for an older one. We could say that he simply replaces previous evolutionary positivism with French existentialist psychoanalysis: Paz’s psychopathology of the national condition as more or less the direct inheritor of William Robertson’s and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s dismissals of the American continent during the eighteenth century and as quite close to Arguedas’s evolutionist and racist Pueblo enfermo, since both Arguedas and Paz attempt to give a symptomatology behind the weakness and paralysis of their respective countries.11 INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

9

Yet however beholden to previous pathologizing agendas it might be, Paz’s analysis somehow resists therapeutic prescriptiveness as well as the nihilistic resignation of the pathologists. His is a powerful commentary on the discomforts and contingencies and on the incompleteness of failure: failures of communication, of community, of transcendence. His analysis points to an epistemological feature of Mexican culture from its very beginning as a nation in the early nineteenth century and even earlier, as evidenced in the Historia verdadera. Whether or not they stoically accept defeat in fact, Mexicans see themselves as stoically accepting it; recall Paz’s ‘‘para nosotros un realista siempre es un pesimista’’ (20) [to us a realist is always a pessimist] (22). Given Paz’s careful treatment of the perception of failure, it is crucial to observe that his argument never states, either explicitly or implicitly, that Mexicans are failures or even that they regard themselves as failures.To the contrary Paz implies that the very knowledge of a depressed reality, the frank acceptance of a bad situation, is paradoxically liberating. Such a knowledge permits the riotous acts of celebration during saints’ days and holidays that he describes so vividly. Paz reminds us that it is impossible to overestimate the socially galvanizing power of commiseration.12 The French would call this the ‘‘mémoire de la boue,’’ remembrance of having wallowed in the mud: the bond created by mulling over bad times, by the mutual acknowledgment of having shared passage through dire straits, unites the Mexican imagined community. The analysis offered by Paz is itself dualistic. It teeters between deeply paralyzing pessimism and euphoric action. He argues that the Mexican psyche is defined entirely by its traumatic history, its originary rape by the Spanish conquistador father. The extension of this traumatic model leads to one of two possible conclusions. On the one hand, the overwhelming knowledge of this rape can easily cause aporia, the paralysis that results from the discouraging sense that nothing can be done. Too much knowledge can translate into quietism; this is the same paralyzing tyranny of melancholia warned about by Bartra. But, on the other hand, knowledge of this traumatic history can spur the colonized mind into its only solution, which is to change itself. The only way out of the neurosis of a traumatic origin is for the colonized subject to become someone else altogether through a process of radical redefinition (a process, curiously enough, similar to the familiar Romantic fall into self-awareness and historically coetaneous with the birth of the modern nation). This shocking realization can then spark a refashioning of identity 10


on many levels, from the personal to the national, as it did for the Martiniquan writer Frantz Fanon (who wrote a text quite similar to El laberinto during the same period and who became an anticolonial resistance fighter in Algiers).13 This ambiguity between pessimistic aporia on the one hand and liberating action on the other is one of the intentional traps of Paz’s and Fanon’s dualistic faith: while most of the time the Mexican is bogged down by silence, during feast days he or she breaks loose to compensate for that oppressive silence. It is as if allowing two radically opposing outcomes to coexist in their analysis creates a space for free will and, ultimately, for self-knowledge. Paz’s essay speaks to an embrace, and a useful employment, of failure. El laberinto de la soledad ’s attention to the tug-of-war between pessimism and euphoria, between Lent and Carnival, is played out in the language of religious ritual (Paz was an avid reader of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane), a language that in turn rests on the concept of liminality.14 Liminality has received particular theoretical attention, especially in light of recent thought on marginality and différance.15 In the original anthropological sense, ‘‘liminality’’ means the threshold, and it is used to describe the part of a rite of passage wherein the participants— initiates into adulthood, say—cross an imaginary border into a symbolic parallel society ‘‘betwixt and between’’ (Turner, Ritual Process, 95). Social rules, habits, and conventions are temporarily suspended in this parallel society. Examples of liminal rites include carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin explores, the initiations of the young into adulthood, and celebrations of other life-transitions, like wakes and weddings: all of these are located within liminal space. Their celebrants are deliberately placed in a parallel and ‘‘upside-down’’ space, vaguely reminiscent of the world they left behind; but their merriment mocks the structures and conventions of that world. To be in liminality is to exist transitionally, neither here nor there. Perhaps owing to the widespread influence of Bakhtin’s notion of carnivalesque inversion or to Victor Turner’s studies of the liminal in 1960s radicalism, virtually all recent theoretical interest in liminality tends to dwell on carnival as revolution: on the festive, chaotic, or destabilizing qualities often aligned with the radical Left. Most deployments of the term pay attention to the subversive and therapeutic quality of liminality, to what Turner might call ‘‘status reversal’’ and Gustavo Pérez Firmat describes as the ‘‘unstable, aggressive, treacherous liminality, one that consistently threatens to collapse the center-periphery distinction’’ (Literature, 16). This stresses liminality’s INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

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function as an ‘‘anti-structure’’ to the ‘‘structure’’ of mainstream institutions and practices, casting it as a perspective-granting place of marginalization, a temporary ‘‘outside’’ vantage point from which to question the establishment. The belief is that reveling can be revealing. While there is no doubt that liminality liberates and expands perspectives, there is another aspect to consider. Terry Eagleton ruminates that Bakhtinian carnival is a ‘‘licensed affair’’: only a temporary reversal of power structures and fully permitted by those powers (Walter Benjamin, 148). While it is true that the liminal can be life-affirming and creative, it can never live up to its revolutionary potential, despite the sincerest wishes of Bakhtinian utopianism: a precondition of its existence is that it lasts only a short period and then only by the grace of the authorities. Those most surprised at the end of the party are the partygoers themselves, because liminality, like all parties, must always come to an end. There is a clear connection between liminality and failure. Carnival is tinged with a kind of sadness, partly because it is a celebration of transition, both a new beginning and also an ending—of childhood, of life, of a season. But the sadness of carnival is an introspective mourning for its own imminent passing, what Frank Kermode would call its sense of an ending: carnival is celebrated under the shadow of its own fleeting impermanence. After the frenzied celebration outside of the ‘‘rule of law, custom, and convention,’’ the celebrants always return to the fold (Turner, Ritual Process, 95). The very intensity of carnival is due in part to its brevity. In short, liminality is inscribed with its own failure. Awareness of this impending failure is the reason why liminality is so liberating, at least temporarily. Recall de Man’s notion of dédoublement: it involves some event which makes one terribly self-aware but immediately afterward forces a correction as one regains composure and returns to oneself, to the fold of self-possession. This process, which occurs at an individual level, is a miniature version of the liminality that occurs at the collective level. The first monumental (and foundational) text considered here, Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera de la conquista (1568, 1632), represents a curious example of this dynamic. In it we see a desperate attempt to keep liminality, the euphoric state of ‘‘neither here nor there,’’ alive perpetually. Toward the end of the Historia, Bernal tells how the first generation of conquistadores, now semifeudal landowners, find the tables turned on them. Now they have become the embattled defenders of the allotments of land and Indians they acquired after the Conquest. They fight a new horde of invaders, the Spanish colonial au12


thorities who try to take everything away from them, including their stories. The old conquistadores in essence try to extend forever the freefor-all liminal space that was created upon vanquishing the Aztecs. Of course, this is impossible. We see the old soldiers lose the battle to maintain a hold on their spoils, their independent place, and ultimately their story. It is a strange and sad carnival, brimming with the sense of an ending, at the heart of the very beginning. It is significant that at the heart of this foundational epic of Mexico (and of all Latin America, for that matter) we find an effort to negotiate its own failures.16 This constitutive failure at the very source of Mexican national identity changes its shape and its resonance at the next historical crossroads upon which I concentrate, the birth of the nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the tone and the rhetorical strategies for accounting for failure are well and deeply laid out by the Historia verdadera and reticulate through this ‘‘pillar of our being’’ and through all subsequent ones. One final historical consideration: these pillars are in fundamental ways all moments of revolution, of change. And all revolutions are struggles to reject the father. The history of Mexico, and indeed of all Latin America, is in many ways the story of dictators. As many interpreters of Latin American reality have long noted, its culture is heavily dominated by strongmen and by the ‘‘voice of the Master,’’ in González Echevarría’s usage.17 These authoritative, teacherly, and paternal figures—caudillos, arbiters of culture, the tired stereotype of the macho— indeed possess loud, domineering, and magisterial voices that punctuate the ages, from the very first voice of Hernán Cortés the conqueror in his ‘‘Cartas de relación,’’ through Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, and Domingo Sarmiento, through present-day caudillos almost too numerous to list. But these magisterial voices are not infallible; nor are they incapable of unintentional humility. They sometimes trip down the stairs of their dictator’s balconies, falter in their pulpits, or find that their stifling place at the head of the table or bureaucrat’s desk has been taken away. Sometimes these occasional downfalls are brought about by the restless subjects who throw rocks and defy the master. But at other times the father simply trips over himself. These times are admittedly rare, but they are the ones that concern us here. The moment when the father falters, when the voice of the master cracks in its steady soliloquies, can, and on occasion does, lead to a moment of clarity, to a de Manian dédoublement for all involved. The tutelary voice when it finds INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

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itself humbled is not necessarily silenced, however. It must, though, reassess and in some cases reinvent itself and its mission (as was the case with José Vasconcelos, paternal master who tried to mold the future of his nation and a caudillo if there ever was one). At other times it simply reveals the master’s voice for what it is to those who watched the slipup (as in the case of Lizardi). And at other moments it makes the voice even stronger because it gives it unprecedented depth (as in the case of Fuentes). A curious phenomenon comes to the foreground upon consideration of these instances of magisterial failure: the monumental figures, with high places in the collective memory, have become memorialized unapologetically and even proudly as failures. Recall Fuentes’s observation about the priest Don Miguel Hidalgo, the father of Mexican Independence, who ‘‘ended up with his head on exhibit on a lance’’ (Myself, 5). This is a kind of negative triumphalism, where fallen fathers are fully recognized as fallible and because of this are the more admirable; the monuments dedicated to them show their cracks in all their glory. Finally, we turn again to Fuentes, himself a towering monument in the Mexican cultural landscape of the last fifty years, for a useful summation of the dynamic I am describing. The short story ‘‘Día de las madres,’’ from the collection Agua quemada (1980), is somewhat of a departure from the direction in which Fuentes’s work had been heading for the previous two decades (the grandiosely self-titled ‘‘La edad del tiempo’’ [age of time]). Instead of spanning the seven decades of Mexican history as does La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) the story spans one evening; and instead of claiming to speak for the wounded psyche of an entire country—or an entire hemisphere, as he does in Terra nostra (1975)—it speaks for the wounded psyche of a single family on a single night. In this humility of scale is a kind of retraction or self-correction, akin to the phenomenon I observe in all of the writers studied here, but perhaps closest to Alexander von Humboldt’s humility after recognizing the limits of speaking for an entire people and its landscape. In ‘‘Día de las madres,’’ we find three male generations of the Vergara family living in an ostentatious mansion in an upper-crust neighborhood of Mexico City: there is the General, a revolutionary hero in his winter years; his son, the pompous, stylish, and distant Agustín, who grew up taking for granted the benefits his father fought for and disdaining the old man’s tales of heroism; and Agustín’s adolescent son Plutarco, who narrates the story many years later. It is a painfully silent 14


house, full of the grandfather’s memories of his glorious war and his departed wife, Clotilde, Agustín’s ostentation, and an inexplicable silence about Evangelina, Plutarco’s missing mother. Oppressed by this environment, Plutarco eventually chides his father ‘‘que me hayas dejado fuera de todo, hasta del dolor’’ [for leaving me out of everything, even the pain] (Agua, 38). Something is missing, but Plutarco cannot express what that is. The story recounts Plutarco’s search for the object of his sorrow and for a way of expressing it. In the watershed moment of the story, Agustín and the General have an angry confrontation when Agustín reveals that the family is bankrupt. Plutarco, who has been listening, hidden significantly behind a statue of the headless Winged Victory, emerges and thunders off with his grandfather for a night of raising hell and squandering what remains of their depleted savings. The boy and the old man, as Plutarco exclaims, seek to ‘‘empezar de nuevo’’ [start from scratch] (23). This night on the town becomes Plutarco’s attempt to relive the General’s revolutionary glory, a motif familiar to readers of Fuentes (recall the old revolutionary Artemio Cruz, whose son Lorenzo dies in the Spanish Civil War while trying to replicate his father’s military heroics). The two revelers, ‘‘seguros de la victoria’’ [sure of victory] (30), embark on their pathetic reenactment of the Revolution. In a chaotic scene, again familiar to readers of Fuentes, the language of the distant past becomes indistinguishable from that of the present. The music of revolutionary corridos comically blends with bad 1950s lounge singers; a ludicrous barfight becomes the bloody battle of Celaya. Images of horses tripping over their own entrails and of General Alvaro Obregón having his arm blown off mix with scenes of inebriated musicians and fat chorus girls. General Vergara marshals his son and the group of drunken mariachis they have collected as their new Revolutionary Army to a rousing victory. Yet much as the Revolution was to disappoint the generation that fought it, the night is bound to disappoint the young Plutarco, who fails to re-create the glorious past. The boy becomes brutally aware that the old man’s history belongs only to him and can never be shared, at least not in a vital way. That Revolution is over; it exists only in the old man’s stories and in the illegal fortunes made from it that sustain parasites like Agustín. Instead of proving himself worthy of entry into the General’s glorious history, he sees his grandfather for what he really is now: old, dying, and surrounded by comical drunks. This process of demystification bottoms out when the pair ends up INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

15

in a whorehouse, where Plutarco watches numbly as the old man fails to perform with a prostitute. The pathos becomes obvious to Plutarco; the grandfather is only a shade of his own grandiose and monumental memories. Plutarco tries to rescue the General’s dignity by jumping in himself and finishing for the old man. A much older and wiser Plutarco, as the narrator of the story, reflects on that moment of mixed victory: Mi abuelo sentado en una silla, triste y silencioso, como si mirara la vida renacer y ya no fuese la suya ni pudiese serlo nunca más . . . sólo yo vencía, la victoria era sólo para mí y nadie más, por eso no me supo a nada, no era como esos actos de todos de los que hablaba el General, quizás por eso la tristeza de mi abuelo era tan grande y tan grande fue, para siempre, la melancolía de la libertad que entonces creí ganarme. (35) [My grandfather (was) sitting sad and quiet in a chair, as if he were watching life renew itself, but it is not his anymore, nor could it ever again be so . . . victory was mine and no one else’s, which was why it didn’t taste like anything, it wasn’t like those collective efforts of which the General talked; perhaps this is why my grandfather’s sadness was always so great, just as my own nostalgia was great, the nostalgia for the freedom which I then thought I was winning for myself.]

The victory, like the statue of the Winged Victory, is headless. This reversal of the archetypical primal scene yields another irony: the progenitor watches his descendant copulate, instead of the other way around. In having sex with the prostitute (who resembles Plutarco’s mother, the General remarks), Plutarco has taken command of the primal scene and overthrown the father. Yet this overthrow, this act of supposed triumph, rings hollow. The young man does not find the answers he seeks in this victory over the patriarch. It generates nothing lasting. Even the sex, as he notes, was unsatisfying. At the end of their journey that night, Plutarco realizes that his grandfather is impotent in more than just the physical sense. Like Bernal Díaz’s soldiers who fruitlessly try to repeat the old war, the General is battling time and its inevitable end. Most importantly, Plutarco slowly learns that he cannot claim others’ experiences, their vehicles of loss as his own. The old man’s world, which was initially promising, is as dead to him as his father’s ostentatious mansion. Despite the title of the story, there is a significant absence of women in it.18 Plutarco has no vestiges, no memory, of them; he has no past to 16


recall. As in the versatile Mexican insult, Plutarco no tiene ni madre [doesn’t even have a mother], meaning ‘‘he has nothing,’’ not even the memory of the loss. The first time he saw his own mother was when a jeering schoolmate showed him a faded picture of her as a bathing-suit beauty queen. Plutarco is at a double loss; the drunken jaunt in the city is a double search. Not only does he seek a common ‘‘mother tongue’’ with which to mourn: he needs something, someone, to remember. Plutarco wishes desperately to remember the women his elders remember and to mourn their loss with them, but he cannot. His dilemma is a unique complication of the Freudian notion of repetition compulsion, where an analysand is condemned to repeat the trauma: the swirling memories are not those of the analysand, who is caught in a repetition compulsion without anything to repeat.19 Plutarco’s own moment of reckoning—his own personal moment of failure, distinct from the patriarchs’—comes only when he realizes that he has been attempting to remember using someone else’s borrowed memory, trying to share in a history not truly his. Only when the drunken night of his ‘‘liberation’’ can be repeated on its own terms, when he can remember his own events and ‘‘start from scratch,’’ will catharsis happen. So does Plutarco heal? Does he find his language of mourning? Ultimately his language of mourning is precisely this narration, with which he breaks the many years of silence that oppressed him in the House of Vergara. The narrator is an older Plutarco, jogging his memory, finally exorcising his old ghosts. At the time of narration, he admits that he is ‘‘past thirtyish’’ and that the General is long since dead. Like the Greek historian Plutarch, author of the Parallel Lives, Plutarco is writing the story of great men by pairs, exploring the past in order to make sense of his own present. The night he recalls in this story is not a long-gone battle of the Revolution; nor is it the scene of a movie melodrama. It is his own past: his parallel life is his own, but as an older, wiser person. The chief regret in ‘‘El día de las madres’’ no longer concerns the missing women or the missed Revolution. Instead, Plutarco mourns what he can remember, what he has lost, from his narrative perspective far in the future: his long-dead grandfather, who agreed to get drunk with him that night; his impotent father, gesturing and acting; and the nowvanished 1950s Mexico City of his youth, full of lights, lounge acts, and whores. Plutarco and his grandfather’s nightlong jaunt, a failed carnival if there ever was one, must end. At the close of his night of revels and revelations, the three men end up at the cemetery, looking at the tombs INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN MONUMENT

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of their women in silence, waiting for dawn to come and for the drinks to wear off. The community of motherless men in the story shares a familiar Mexican reality, as Paz understands it. The men are together in their solitudes, hermetically sharing a ground of loneliness. We are left, then, with a final irony. This is a Mother’s Day that commemorates not departed women but departed men. Plutarco’s memories of Mother’s Day are not about mothers and grandmothers. They are not about even the Revolution. They are about the men who used to mourn these women and that war and about a certain night in the city. Even victories can sometimes belatedly turn out to be failures (‘‘freedom which I then thought I was winning for myself’’), but often enough these are failures that lead to knowledge. The end of the party, like the man laughing at himself after falling, produces a staggering sobriety, which leaves the reveler bankrupt, embarrassed, staring at a broken monument, but all the wiser.

18


PART 1

The Conquest ‘‘ THE PAPER WARRIOR’’ AT THE SOURCE


CHAPTER 1

Education and Entropy in Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s War to Stop Time

Fuera de que Cide Mahamate fue historiador muy curioso y muy puntual en todas las cosas, y échase bien de ver, pues las que quedan referidas, con ser tan mínimas y tan rateras, no las quiso pasar en silencio; de donde podrán tomar ejemplo los historiadores graves, que nos cuentan las acciones tan corta y sucintamente, que apenas nos llegan a los labios, dejándose en el tintero, ya por descuido, por malicia o ignorancia, lo más sustancial de la obra. (1:201) [Cide Hamete Benegeli was a very careful historian and exact in details, as can be seen in not omitting these points, petty and trivial though they were. This may be taken as an example by those grave historians who give us such brief and inadequate accounts that we hardly get a taste of them, and out of carelessness, malice, or ignorance, leave in their inkhorns the most substantial part of their work.] (156) —DON QUIJOTE

Anger, be now your song . . . —ILIAD, BOOK I

Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632) is a rather odd foundational epic. It contains charged scenes of war and bravery, but it also tells the tale of less momentous struggles for autonomy from the authorities, both textual and legal. At the time he was composing the Historia verdadera, in the 1560s, forty years after the Conquest, Bernal found himself embroiled in a legal war to preserve his encomienda, the allotments of land and Indians which were his share of the spoils. Immediately after the Conquest, and before the Spanish Crown had a chance to establish itself in the conquered territories, the conquerors had divided the country and its inhabitants among themselves in semifeudal fashion. The authorities, of course, now wanted all of this ‘‘back.’’ 1

With these legal battles in the background, the Historia verdadera was meant, in part, as Bernal’s record of his merits and services. Throughout his lifetime, many of his fellow conquerors had filed brief probanzas or official affidavits in the form of narrative known as a relación. These were first-person statements addressed to a higher, presumably judicial audience holding decision-making power over the speaker.2 Similarly, although the Historia verdadera announces itself as a ‘‘history,’’ an expressly literary form in the sixteenth century, it begins with a notarial air: ‘‘Yo Bernal Díaz del Castillo, vecino y regidor de la muy leal ciudad de Santiago’’ (3) [I Bernal Díaz del Castillo, citizen and Regidor of the most loyal city of Santiago] (1:5).3 He defers to a lofty audience, presumably the Council of Indies: ‘‘Puesto que no vaya espresando otras cosas que abía que dezir, perdónenme sus mercedes’’ (179) [If I have not said anything that I ought to have said, may your honours pardon me] (2:44).4 Bernal’s relationship to the powers he addresses is conflicted, however. Since the authorities are trying to strip him of what he has, Bernal is both deferential to and suspicious of them, at once respectful and wary. In his story Bernal demonstrates a similarly conflicted relationship to another, more textual, set of rapacious authorities: the competing histories of the war. These published accounts began surfacing in Spain not long after the Conquest. They represented several, often conflicting, agendas and points of view. Early in his own story Bernal informs us that he has become aware of these accounts, ‘‘Estando escriviendo en esta mi corónica, acaso vi lo que escriven Gómara, e Illescas, y Jovio, en las conquistas de México y Nueva España; y desque las leí, y entendí, y vide su policía, y estas mis palabras tan groseras y sin primor, dexé de escrivir en ella’’ (33–34) [While I was writing this story, I saw by chance what had been written by Gómara and Yllescas and Jovio about the conquest of Mexico and New Spain, and when I had read their accounts and saw and appreciated their polished style, and thought how rudely and lamely my story was told, I stopped writing it] (1:66). Like Don Quijote, who encounters a spurious account of his own life, Bernal is both astonished and enraged. A simple and uneducated veteran trying to write a learned history because he believes he knows more about its subject than any man alive, he suddenly feels shown up. Yet after his initial shock Bernal, always the soldier, takes up his pen with a fighting spirit: ‘‘Y estando tan perplejo como digo, torné a leer y a mirar las razones y pláticas que dizen en sus istorias, y desde el prin-

22

THE CONQUEST: ‘‘ THE PAPER WARRIOR’’

cipio y medio ni cabo no hablan lo que pasó en la Nueva España . . . que si todo lo que escriven de otras istorias va como lo de la Nueva España, irá todo herrado’’ (34) [Being in this perplexed state of mind, I saw from the beginning to end that they did not tell correctly what took place in New Spain . . . if they write other histories in the way they have written that of New Spain, such history will be worthless] (1:67). Bernal’s greatest wrath, even greater than his scorn for the enemy, is the one reserved for one of these historians, Francisco López de Gómara, author of Historia de la conquista de México (the second part of a monumental Historia general de las Indias [1552]). Bernal’s anger toward Gómara is quite understandable. Gómara’s claim to be an impartial historian is suspicious from the outset: because he served as Hernán Cortés’s personal chaplain, his text is essentially the ‘‘official story,’’ telling Cortés’s side of events and ignoring many others, including Bernal’s. Furthermore, there is some class resentment. Gómara, who had never been to the Indies, was an educated man, unlike Bernal. Gómara’s work comfortably drops names like Aeneas Sylvius (Pius II) and Niccolò Machiavelli, in sharp contrast to Bernal’s book, which Bernal himself calls ‘‘tosco y rudo’’ [coarse and crude]. Besides being in a debilitating legal war with the bureaucracy, Bernal seems to be at war with Gómara. ‘‘Y todo lo que en aquel caso dize Gómara es burla’’ (283) [All that Gómara says on this matter is nonsense] (2:247) becomes an almost tiresome refrain in Bernal’s text.Yet despite angry challenges over facts Bernal’s principal feud with Gómara is philosophical. Contrasting the composition of the two texts makes it clear that Bernal agreed enough with Gómara’s chronology to rely on it; critics have long pointed out that Gómara’s Historia is in fact a compositional aide de mémoire for Bernal. At times Bernal’s text even follows Gómara’s compressed version of events more closely than the arguably more reliable Cartas de relación, Cortés’s official dispatches to the king sent from the front and published in Europe almost instantly.5 On occasion Bernal even takes entire sections from Gómara almost verbatim, such as the description of the palaces of Moctezuma. The ‘‘stuff’’ of the narrative is obviously not Bernal’s main bone of contention with Gómara. Rather, the feud is methodological. Bernal and Gómara have very different ideas about what to do with the established facts, whatever those may be. In his dedication to Hernán Cortés’s son, Martín, Gómara writes about why he chose his subject:

BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

23

La conquista de México . . . justamente se puede y debe poner entre las historias del mundo, así porque fue bien hecha, como porque fue muy grande. Por ser buena la escribo aparte de las otras, para muestra de todas. (1:36) [The Conquest of Mexico . . . can and should be included among the histories of the world, not only because it was well done but because it was very great; and because it was good, I am writing its history apart from the others, to serve as a sample of them.] (4)

And in his dedication to the reader, he writes about historiography in general: Toda historia, aunque no sea bien escrita, deleita . . . Se debe contentar quien lee historias de saber lo que de sea en suma y verdadero, teniendo por cierto que particularizar las cosas es engañoso y aun muy odioso. (1:39) [Every history, even a badly written one, pleases . . . He who reads histories, therefore, should content himself in knowing what he wishes to learn briefly and accurately, for he knows indeed that a history which gives elaborate details is deceitful and even odious.] (5)

Gómara is a writer of artistic history. For him, the subject of history needs to be exemplary and to serve as an ideal ‘‘sample’’ for all histories. This Aristotelian impulse carries into the selective process involved in writing history: if a history includes excessive detail, then it is ‘‘deceitful’’ simply because it is less formally unified. It is no wonder that Bernal, himself one of the ‘‘details’’ ignored by Gómara, should be apoplectic. ‘‘Gómara no escrive en su historia, ni haze minçión si nos matavan o estávamos heridos, ni pasávamos trabajo, ni adolesçiamos, sino todo lo quescriviese es como quien va a bodas y lo hallávamos hecho’’ (128) [Gómara does not mention or make any record in his history of the fact that any of us were killed or wounded, or underwent any hardships, or suffered, but writes about it all as though we were going to a wedding, and it is thus that we find it recorded] (1:245). Bernal feels that, in abbreviating history in this fashion, Gómara has failed in his responsibility to those who made it happen. Indeed Gómara rarely mentions any other soldiers except Cortés by name; nor does he discuss the common soldier’s relative importance to the enterprise. Except for some lesser luminaries like Gonzalo de Sandoval and Cristóbal de Olid, who are portrayed as minor versions of 24


Cortés, the rest of the soldiers are just an army and not much more than an invaluable tool in Cortés’s hands. Despite its title Gómara’s Historia de la conquista is really a biography (Lesley Byrd Simpson translated it in the 1960s as Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror, by His Secretary). It is shaped as the education of the exemplary young prince. For the modern reader, the portrayal yields little emotional development and no advances in his judgment or character: Cortés is always and already the hero; he has, and always had, what it takes to become conqueror. The true subject of the history is what Gómara calls the ‘‘cómo’’ [the why of it], which led to greatness; the ‘‘cuándo, dónde y quién’’ (1:37) [when, where, and who] (5), while important, are almost circumstantial. Exemplary histories of this kind did not require character development in a modern sense, just insight into the forces behind a great event. According to Gómara, Cortés is a hero not necessarily because of his heroic qualities, his cunning, or his ability to adapt. Rather, Cortés becomes a hero because he finds himself in an intersection of unique circumstances and rises up to meet their demands (see Lewis, ‘‘Humanistic Historiography,’’ 81). In Gómara’s story Cortés’s ascent to victory is so certain that Cortés appears to have little need for true cunning. Instead of appearing instinctual his insights seem simply imposed upon him. When Moctezuma suddenly orders the Spaniards to leave the palace because he has laid a trap for them, ‘‘Cortés cayó luego en la cuenta, que no le pareció que le recibía con el talante que otras veces’’ (1:273) [Cortés saw at once what Moctezuma had in mind, for it seemed to him that the other did not receive him with the same expression as before] (189). Cortés’s thinking, like his heroism, has been thrust upon him. He overcomes obstacle after obstacle; he captures a newly arrived fleet from Cuba; he returns to rescue the besieged in Tenochtitlán; he squelches opposition within his ranks. In his one moment of doubt after a disastrous retreat, ‘‘no sólo lloraba la desventura presente . . . ¿Quién no llorara viendo la muerte y estragos de aquellos que con tanto triunfo, pompa y regocijo entrado habían?’’ (1:312) [not only did he bemoan his present misfortune . . . Who indeed would not weep at the death and ruin of those who had entered in such triumph, pomp, and rejoicing?] (221). Cortés is not shocked by what Bernal describes as the terrible rout that they suffered for trying to escape unwisely with the treasure; nor does he mourn the hundreds of casualties. Rather, he mourns the temporary setback to his meteoric climb in social station, for just a few days ago he had found BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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himself in a courtly world of ‘‘triunfo, pompa y regocijo’’ [triumph, pomp, and rejoicing]. In Gómara’s view, what Cortés accomplishes is greater than himself. When Gómara writes in his dedication to Cortés’s son that the Conquest is to be included among the ‘‘historias del mundo, así porque fue bien hecha, como porque fue muy grande’’ (1:36) [histories of the world, not only because it was well done but because it was very great] (4), ‘‘muy grande’’ [very great] refers to a formally precise essentiality, a narrative and aristocratic quality that goes beyond Cortés the human being or even Cortés the hero. In selecting this exemplary story for its similarity to other, universal stories, Gómara writes for the ages—a broad Aristotelian scope which Bernal resists, as I will discuss in more detail later. Gómara believes that history is the discipline of pointing out what is ‘‘substantial,’’ or essential, in the passage of human events. According to Robert Lewis, for Gómara only events which ‘‘reaffirm the durable elements of human nature’’ are worth including in history (‘‘Humanistic Historiography,’’ 81). As long as there are fresh settings for these events, their ‘‘durable qualities’’ will always resurface (‘‘Humanistic Historiography,’’ 79). Gómara believes in Polybian cycles of history: every generation will have its shining exemplars to mark these cycles. The task of history is to recognize recurrent phases and to discern which are ‘‘substantial’’ and universal: a historian’s work is to see what is noteworthy. In the words of Gómara’s humanist contemporary Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), history must explore ‘‘las causas de los afectos de nuestro ánimo y sus acciones y sus efectos, que es mucho más conveniente conocer que cómo se edificaba en la antigüedad o cómo vestían remotas generaciones humanas’’ (2:648) [the causes behind the inclinations of our spirits and our actions and their effects, rather than knowing how construction was carried out in antiquity or how the ancients dressed]. Gómara expresses a similar sentiment: ‘‘Contar cuándo, dónde y quién hizo una cosa, bien se acierta; empero decir cómo, es dificultoso’’ (1:39) [To recount when and where a thing happened, and who did it, offers no difficulty; but to explain the why of it is another a matter] (5). For both Vives and Gómara, the character traits of great men are constant and recurrent. Gómara implies that his choice of subject matter could easily have been one of several of the noteworthy ‘‘historias del mundo’’ [histories of the world], like the ones which tell of ‘‘Nino, Darío y Ciro, que comenzaron los imperios de asirios, medos y persianos’’ (1:35–36) [Nimus, Darius, and Cyrus, who founded the empires of the Assyrians, Medes, and Persians] (3), as they are all ‘‘grandes’’ 26


[great], for the same reasons, and easily recognizable as ‘‘substantial’’ to history. That he could just as well have written about some other hero than Cortés by no means discredits Cortés. Rather, Gómara’s contention that Cortés is formally indistinguishable from these other great conquerors amounts to almost sublime propaganda. If all noteworthy histories are essentially the same, whether they recount the exploits of Darius, Nimus, or Cortés, they still need some element to make them distinctive. In Gómara’s story, that element is the almost shocking novelty of its New World setting. Gómara’s entire work makes use of this new geography. In his Historia general de las Indias, instead of presenting discoveries chronologically, Gómara recounts them geographically, starting with northernmost Newfoundland and working his way south.6 Likewise, Gómara fleshes out the Historia with interesting anthropological and panoramic observations about the New World, many of which are taken from well-known accounts, like Toribio de Motolinía’s. These snippets make excellent narrative ‘‘hooks’’ to draw readers into the excitement of the action. The story of Cortés’s march to Tenochtitlán is seeded with chapters on tone-setting marvels like ‘‘el monte que llaman Popocatepec’’ [the mountain called Popocatepetl] (a volcano), Moctezuma’s ‘‘jardines’’ and ‘‘corte y guarda’’ [gardens, court, and bodyguard], and ‘‘los jugadores de pies’’ [foot-jugglers]. In one such instance, after presenting an account of the Spanish fleet’s initial approach to the coasts of Yucatán, Gómara suddenly inserts a chapter entitled ‘‘Del pez tiburón’’ [On Sharks] (Chapter 16): Halláronle dentro más de quinientas raciones de tocino . . . También se halló dentro de su buche un plato de estaño que cayó de la nao de Pedro Alvarado, y tres zapatos desechados, y más un queso . . . Cuentan aquellos de la armada de Cortés que comieron del tocino que sacaron al tiburón del cuerpo, que sabía mejor que lo otro, y que muchos conocieron sus raciones por las ataduras y cuerdas. (1:79–80) [In the belly of the (shark) they found more than five hundred rations of salt pork . . . Our men also found in its gullet a tin plate that had fallen from the ship of Pedro de Alvarado, three ruined shoes, and a cheese . . . The men of the fleet will tell how they ate the salt pork they had taken from the belly of (the shark), and how it had a flavor better than the other, and how some of them recognized their own rations by the knots and cords.] (36–37) BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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This passage at once emphasizes the sheer strangeness of the New World and surreptitiously strengthens the reader’s conviction that Cortés and his expedition must have been brave for venturing into a world full of such monsters. The friendliness of the sailor’s yarn (‘‘cuentan aquellos de la armada’’ [the men of the fleet will tell]) belies a certain foreboding; the uncanny tone of superstition and the echoes of familiar stories (Jonah, The Odyssey) add symbolic weight to the shark as a portent of some kind. The personal belongings found in the belly of the fish foreshadow the constant threats of surveillance and of being eaten, which will hang over the expeditioners as they battle the cannibalistic Aztecs. Full of allusions and internal echoes, Gómara’s highly literary, archetypal story even reaches for the cosmic determinants of myth. It features portentous omens and divine interventions. Referring to an image of the Virgin which Cortés places on an altar during a battle, Gómara writes that ‘‘la mujer del altar les echaba polvos por las caras [a los mexicanos] y los cegaba’’ (1:298) [the woman on the altar cast dust in (the Mexicans’) faces and blinded them] (209). Also, a mysterious man on a ‘‘caballo blanco’’ [white horse] appears to fight alongside the Spaniards (Gómara intimates that this is St. James, the patron saint of the Spanish Reconquista). Bernal Díaz resists Gómara’s heavenward vault and refuses this sort of grandiose mythologizing. Instead he refuses to go beyond the familiar: ‘‘Aquí es donde dice Francisco López de Gómara . . . que eran los santos apóstoles señor Santiago o señor san Pedro . . . en todo nos ayudaba . . . e yo, como pecador, no fuese digno de verles; lo que yo entonces vi y conocí fue a Francisco de Morla en un caballo castaño’’ (65) [It may be that as Gómara says the Glorious Apostles, St. James or St. Peter . . . came to our aid . . . I, a mere sinner, was not worthy of seeing them. What I saw was Francisco de Morla on a chestnut horse] (1:121). He sees no miracles, only hard work, and any attempt to dress things up as more than they are is highly suspicious. Just as he vividly conveys the sights and smells, Bernal likewise insists on the human efforts that won the battles. The distinctions between their accounts of one particular event pointedly illustrate their differences. Gómara has informed us that an astrologer, ‘‘o, como lo llamaban, de nigromántico’’ [some say necromancer], named Botello was among the soldiers entering Tenochtitlán with Cortés. This Botello ‘‘dijera muchos días antes que si se salían de Méjico a cierta hora señalada de noche, que era ésta, se salvarían, y 28


si no, que no’’ (1:309) [had foretold many days before that if they left Mexico at a certain hour of the night, they would save themselves; otherwise not] (219). Bernal, following Gómara, introduces Botello at the same point in his narrative: ‘‘Y demás desto estava con nosotros un soldado que se dezía Botello, al paresçer muy hombre de bien y latino, y avía estado en Roma y dezían que era ingrumántico, otros que tenía familiar, algunos le llaman astrólogo’’ (281) [There was with us a soldier named Botello, apparently an honest man and a Latin scholar, who had been in Rome, and it was said that he was a magician, others said that he had a familiar spirit, and some called him an astrologer] (2:242). But Bernal, unlike Gómara, kills Botello off during the disastrous retreat that follows. Bernal then opens up his magician’s trunk and exposes the bizarre contents: Y diré como se hallaron en una petaca deste Botello, después questuvimos en salvo, unos papeles como libro, con çifras y rayas y apuntamientos y señales, que dezía en ellas: si he de morir aquí en esta triste guerra en poder destos perros indios. Y dezía en otras çifras y rayas más adelante: no morirás. Y tornava a dezir en otras çifras y rayas y apuntamientos: sí morirás. Y respondía la otra raya: no morirás . . . Y tanbién se halló en la petaca una natura como de honbre, de la obra de un jeme, hecha de baldres, ni más ni menos. (284) [There were found in the box of this Botello some papers like a book, with symbols, lines, remarks and signs, and it said in them: ‘‘Am I to die here in this sad war in the power of these dogs and Indians?’’ and it said among other lines and symbols further on, ‘‘thou wilt not die,’’ and it went on to say in other symbols, lines, and remarks, ‘‘Shall I die?’’ and the other line replied, ‘‘thou shalt not die’’ . . . There was also found in the box a thing like the genitals of a man, half a span long, made of leather, no less.] (2:249)

By placing the tools of bookish knowledge next to the false phallus, Bernal questions both the manliness and the effectiveness of those who try to tempt fate and change the cosmic order with a book. Botello, the master of arcane abstractions, is proven impotent; and by extension so is Gómara. Magical scribblings—necromantic as well as rhetorical— will save no one in the end. ‘‘[Al] astrólogo Botello no le aprovechó su astrología’’ (284) [Astrology availed him (Botello) nothing] (2:249), writes Bernal. In battle, only good soldiering matters. Bernal is obviously not writing for or about heroic archetypes or universal certainties. His vision of events has a narrower purpose and BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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focus. As Stephen Greenblatt points out, the unifying principle in the Historia verdadera is the Conquest itself; it is the only narrative constant. ‘‘Sardonic, knowing smiles’’ against Cortés are acceptable because they are contained in ‘‘local ironies,’’ which ‘‘are not allowed to extend to the entire enterprise’’ (Marvelous Possessions, 130). Bernal can represent Cortés as a gifted briber who backhandedly swears ‘‘by his conscience,’’ because it is a credit to him, and a factor in the success of the enterprise, that he is such a rogue; Bernal is free to represent duplicity on the part of Cortés without tainting the enterprise as a whole. It is in the spirit of democratic polyphony that honest judgment can be applied to anyone, including himself; indeed Bernal often chastises and makes fun of himself, as when he refers to an island ‘‘del nombre feo . . . tal de Bernal’’ (304) [of (that) ugly name . . . Bernal] (2:282). As often as he can, Bernal stresses the collective nature of the whole enterprise. The Historia verdadera is almost overwhelmingly full of people. ‘‘Cortés ninguna cosa decía ni hacía sin primero tomar sobre ello muy maduro consejo y acuerdo con nosotros’’ (127) [Cortés never did or said anything (important) without first asking . . . and acting in concert with us] (1:243–44).7 Only group effort is beyond reproach. Yet, despite his fealty to the collective, Bernal’s vision of history is more private than Gómara’s. The reach of his narrative is purposefully limited to his own personal experience. Writing in response to Gómara’s omniscient, third-person account, Bernal explicitly adopts the form of a first-person testimonial. At one point he excuses himself for having to relate events secondhand, ‘‘como yo no fui en esta entrada, por esto digo en esta mi relaçión fueron y esto hicieron y tal les acaesçió, y no digo hezimos ni hize, ni vi, ni en ello me hallé’’ (339) [since I did not go on this expedition, I state in this narrative ‘‘they went’’ and ‘‘they accomplished that’’ and ‘‘this befell them’’ rather than saying ‘‘we did’’ or ‘‘I saw’’ or ‘‘I found myself in’’] (2:280). On this score, Bernal’s litany against Gómara is relentless. ‘‘He was not there,’’ the soldier repeats increasingly about the historian (one critic describes Bernal’s voice as growing ‘‘plaintive and whiny’’ [Brody, ‘‘Bernal’s Strategies,’’ 335]). Gómara writes that during the disastrous retreat from Tenochtitlán Pedro de Alvarado is the last man out and finds himself caught in an impasse on a causeway where the bridge has been destroyed. Alvarado ‘‘prodigiously’’ takes his lance and pole-vaults with it to safety, a feat which left ‘‘los indios espantados y aun los españoles’’ (1:311) [the Indians amazed and even the Spaniards] (221). Bernal takes issue and points to the implausibility of such athletics: 30


Ningún soldado se parava a vello si saltava poco o mucho, porque harto teníamos que salvar nuestras vidas . . . Y todo lo que en aquel caso dize Gómara es burla, por que ya que quisiera saltar y sustentarse en la lança, estava el agua muy honda, y no podía llegar al suelo con ella. (283–284) [Not a single soldier stopped to see if he leaped much or little, for we could hardly save our own lives . . . All that Gómara says on this subject is nonsense, for as to wishing to leap and hold himself up with his lance, the water was very deep, and he could not have touched ground with it.] (2:247)

Gómara’s research is not deep enough—nor could it ever be, since he was never there, fighting and getting his evidence firsthand: he needed to have seen it himself to know that no one would have noticed this ‘‘feat.’’ Gómara, Bernal scoffs, knows too much to have actually been there. He was easily taken in by an after-the-fact yarn. Bernal’s aesthetic alternative to Gómara’s universalism and emphasis on research involves writing in real-time about events within the grasp of one’s memory. Bernal is writing in the here-and-now, about things in the recent past, for and about people of the world, and for the sake of things that can still be changed. In Bernal’s conception the historian’s responsibility to the present is more pressing than an abstract responsibility to the distant past or to future generations; as Anthony Cascardi puts it, Bernal ‘‘recognizes the importance of the past, but he cannot escape its memory. He seems blind to the future’’ (‘‘Chronicle,’’ 211). With any luck, someone will listen now, and Bernal and his comrades will keep their lands and the honor they richly deserve. The differences between Bernal and Gómara extend to the task of writing itself. A common critical convention casts Gómara and Bernal as stylistic opposites: Gómara’s prose is polished; Bernal’s, rough. Bernal is first and foremost a soldier, a man of action, and his unfinished words reflect this condition. According to this view, Bernal’s very roughness also makes him a more reliable narrator than Gómara: his principal creative act was being part of the Conquest, not crafting a carefully embellished version of it. His roughness is a measure of veracity and bears witness to his proximity to the event.8 At first glance there is much evidence to support this dichotomy. As we have seen, Bernal is highly suspicious of learned embellishment of any kind and of Gómara’s calculation in particular. In contrast to Gómara’s well-measured narrative, Bernal’s expansive memorial is closer in feel to extemporaneous orality. For instance, witness his use BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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of the catalogue, like this one describing the lineup of various horses for the expedition: El capitán Cortés, un cavallo castaño y zaino, que luego se le murió en San Juan de Hulúa . . . Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero, una yegue ruzia de buena carrera, que le conpró Cortés por las laçadas de oro . . . Joan Velázquez de León, otra yegua ruzia, muy poderosa, que llamávamos la rabona . . . Juan dEscalante, un caballo castaño claro tresalvo, no fue bueno. (45) [The Captain Cortés: a vicious dark chestnut horse, which died as soon as we arrived at San Juan de Ulúa . . . Alonzo Hernández de Puertocarrero: a grey mare, a very good charger which Cortés bought for him with his gold buttons . . . Juan Velázquez de León: another very powerful grey mare which we called ‘‘La Rabona,’’ very hardy and a good charger . . . Juan de Escalante: a light chestnut horse with three white stockings, not much good. (1:86–87)

Like the catalogue of ships and men in Book 2 of the Iliad, this is a functional mnemonic aid; its steady rhythm and repetitive form, like a soldier’s cadence, are meant to jog the memory, to aid in the oral delivery. This bare-bones functionality is further heightened by the brutal honesty, the lackluster quality of what is being recalled: horses that were ‘‘no . . . bueno’’ [not much good] or were bought with ‘‘laçadas de oro’’ [gold buttons]. This at once brings human scale to the tone and highlights the unlikely odds of the expedition. Although Gómara employs the same type of cataloguing device, he does so in a sophisticated manner, keenly aware of its traditional function yet ironizing it and turning it into an inside joke. When, for the sake of full disclosure, Gómara needs to mention a previous attempt to conquer Mexico before Cortés’s noble adventure, he stresses its insignificance. Instead of telling the factual events of Juan de Grijalba’s expedition, he teases the enterprise by reducing it to a mock catalogue, a paltry ledger entry: Hubo, en fin, lo siguiente: Un idolico de oro, hueco.

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Otro idolejo de lo mismo, con cuernos y cabellera, que tenía un sartal al cuello, un moscador en la mano, y una piedrecica en el ombligo. Una como patena de oro delgada, y con algunas piedras engastadas. Un casquete de oro, con cuernos y cabellera negra. Veintidós arracadas de oro, más chicas. (1:51–52) [In brief, what he acquired was the following: 1 small hollow idol 1 same, with horns and hair, and a chain about its neck, a flytrap in its hand, and a small jewel in its navel 1 piece like a gold medallion, with several stones set in it 1 helmet, gold, with two horns and black hair. 22 earrings, smaller.] (14–18)

The list goes on for pages. Gómara’s list of the miserable yield is a witty way to diminish Cortés’s rival. This is a knowing formal pun, an accounting instead of an account, and the ironic use of the device leaves behind its distant epic and oral origins. Unlike Bernal, Gómara often relies heavily on this sort of erudite irony, which is obviously useful for making light of inconvenient details. Another section describes the sudden death of a bureaucrat sent to audit Cortés (who more than once was suspected of poisoning his enemies): Los que no querían a Cortés publicaban que murió de ponzoña. Mas el licenciado Pero López y el doctor Ojeda, que lo curaron, llevaron los términos y cura de la modorra; y así juraron que había muerto de ella, y trajeron por consecuencia cómo la tarde antes de que muriese hizo que le tañesen una baja; y él así, echado como estaba en la cama, la anduvo con pies señalando los compases y contrapases, cosa que muchos la vieron; y que luego perdió la habla; y aquella noche espiró antes del alba. Pocos mueren bailando como este letrado. (2:176–177) [Cortés’ enemies spread the rumor that the Licenciado had died of poison; but the Licenciado Pero López and doctor Ojeda, who attended him, treated him for modorra, and swore that it was the cause of his death. (They) even testified that in the afternoon before he died, he had the drums rolled for the dying, and during the ceremony he kept time with his feet, as witnessed by many. Then he lost the power of speech and died before dawn. Few have died dancing as this lawyer did!] (382)


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Always assuming the role of scrupulous historian, Gómara first offers expert witnesses who ‘‘swear’’ to the natural causes of the death of this pesky meddler. But just in case this evidence is not enough to sway the reader, he pokes fun at the very accusation: the lawyer had such a pleasant death that it could not have been murder. Bernal, in contrast, refuses to use such well-strategized and rarefied devices. He has no time to think of clever ripostes or craft deadpan irony; just getting the story straight is complicated enough for him. With its breathless tone, his writing feels closer to oral testimony. At times Bernal even seems to trip over simple narrative sequences: he often interrupts a heated battle to mention where one particular soldier settled long after the war, or how another soldier’s descendants ended up in a lawsuit, or simply that so-and-so was known as ‘‘el dançador’’ [the dancer] or as ‘‘Juan traslapuerta’’ (305) [Juan Behind-the-Door]. He suddenly breaks the continuity of one pitched engagement with an honest, if out-of-place, tribute to one of the fallen horsemen: ‘‘Y dende a pocos días murió de aquella mala caída. E traído esto aquí a la memoria deste soldado, porqueste Gonçalo Domínguez era uno de los mejores jinetes y esforçado que Cortés avía traído en nuestra conpañía, y teníamosle en tanto en las guerras por su esfuerzo’’ (338) [The man died from his injuries within a few days. I call this to mind because Gonzalo Domínguez was one of the most valiant men Cortés had brought in his company, and we held him in much esteem] (4:46). In another instance Cortés orders a mutineer bound, and Bernal recalls the scene in eerie detail: ‘‘[Cortés] no le consintió que paresçiese delante dél, antes le mandó hechar preso en un cepo de madera, que entonces hizieron nuevamente; acuérdome que olía la madera de aquel cepo como a sabor de axos o çebollas. Y estuvo preso dos días’’ (207) [(Cortés) would not allow him to be brought before him, but ordered him to be imprisoned in some wooden stocks; I remember that the wood of those stocks had a scent of onions or garlic and he remained a prisoner for two days] (2:103). The smell of ‘‘axos o çebollas’’ [garlic or onions], so vivid in Bernal’s memory, is precisely the kind of ‘‘deceitful, odious’’ detail which Gómara wishes to avoid. Bernal’s brand of history needs to be about details like these. Nevertheless, the writerly differences between Gómara and Bernal do not amount to a fundamental dichotomy in which Gómara is polished and Bernal sin letras (Bernal’s own protestations aside).9 Given Bernal’s mistrust of literary authority and artifice of any kind,

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it is significant that he continually refers to one (quite literary) book: Gómara’s. Bernal usually shies from direct citation from either high or low sources. In a classic article (‘‘Bernal de Castillo and Amadís de Gaula’’), Stephen Gilman points out that the Historia verdadera is a treasury of sixteenth-century popular culture, since it is packed with received wisdom, refranes, doggerel, and citations from the fantastic literature of the day. While this may be true, it is important to note the terms on which Bernal makes most of his references to external sources. He always balks at being the first to suggest an allusion of any kind. For instance, when the Spaniards burn their ships in order to prevent mutineers from returning to Cuba, the inevitable comparison to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon is first suggested not by Bernal the narrator but by the character of Cortés. Occasional references to popular ballads come not from Bernal but from the mouth of a passing soldier, as when in Chapter 36 we get a verse from the Cancionero. Even the famous allusion to the Amadís de Gaula in Chapter 87 (much discussed by Gilman), when Bernal first sees the great towers of Mexico, is at one remove and couched in hearsay: ‘‘Y nos quedábamos admirados, y decíamos que parecía a las cosas de encantamiento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís’’ (175) [(and) we said it was like the enchantments they tell of in the Legend of Amadís] (2:37; my emphasis). Given his shyness about direct quotation of any sort, it is startling to realize how closely Bernal’s text hews to Gómara’s. Indeed Bernal could be read as a sort of gloss of Gómara. His title echoes Gómara’s emphatically, even litigiously. Bernal writes the Historia verdadera de la conquista [The True History of the Conquest] in retort to Gómara’s mere Historia de la conquista. However much he resents and reacts to Gómara, Bernal is not blind to Gómara’s merit as a writer. ‘‘[A]quel cronista Gómara,’’ Bernal writes wistfully, ‘‘si como tiene buena retórica en lo quescriviere, açertara a dizir lo que pasó, muy bien fuera’’ (295) [It would be a very good thing if . . . Gómara’s success in telling the truth . . . were as excellent as the style in which he writes] (2:226). In reality, Bernal and Gómara are actually closer to one another than Bernal cares to acknowledge. Bernal spent seventeen years composing his Historia. Like the two soldiers in his narrative who become familiar enough with the local habits to dress in native garb in order to carry out spy missions, Bernal could hardly have spent so long in Gómara’s


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territory without learning some of his habits.10 This secret sharing becomes especially apparent in the latter part of the Historia verdadera, when Bernal describes the pacification of the outlying provinces after the fall of Tenochtitlán. Bernal carefully but unmistakably lifts his account from Gómara: the chronology, the narrative order of simultaneously occurring events, and even the language of some of the sections come straight from the chaplain’s work.11 At one point, Bernal’s description of an Aztec sacrificial area prompts what seems to be a moving display of survivor-guilt. The onslaught of details apparently drives the narrator to distraction: ‘‘no se me acuerda el nonbre [del lugar]. Y todo estaba lleno de sangre, así paredes como altar y hera tanto el hedor que no veíamos la hora que salirnos afuera. Y allí tenían un atanbor muy grande en demasía, que cuando le tañían el sonido hera tan triste’’ (193) [I do not remember its name, and everything was covered with blood, both walls and altar, and the stench was such that we could hardly wait the moment to get out; they had an exceedingly large drum there and when they beat it the sound was so dismal] (2:77). But comparison of this moving passage to Gómara reveals the real reason behind this breakdown: not the rush of memory but rather the fatigue of transcribing Gómara word for word makes Bernal resort to a telegraphic shorthand. Luckily for him, his sloppiness looks like traumatic recall.12 When the two texts run the risk of being identical, Bernal alters some of the details slightly, perhaps in order to avoid shameless wholesale copying. For instance, when Gómara describes a troop convoy as taking ‘‘seis horas’’ [six hours] to enter a town, Bernal alters the phrase to read ‘‘medio día’’ [half a day]. These slight changes gradually become more extensive and elaborate and even start taking on a life of their own. In one horrifying section Gómara describes another sacrificial area. He notes the chilling epitaph that a sacrificed soldier left for himself, writing his name in charcoal near the flayed skin of his horse. Gómara leaves it to the reader to imagine a similar fate for the poor soldier.When Bernal copies this scene detail for detail, however, he steamrolls over Gómara’s discretion: Bernal informs us that on the altar was the flayed skin of the soldier, tanned like gloveskin, with the beard still on (2:26). Secretly, Bernal grows more and more comfortable with the creative liberty with which he embellishes Gómara’s words. His search for literary independence gains momentum as the Historia verdadera progresses toward the end. In their respective accounts of the pacifica36


tion campaign that followed the Conquest, both Gómara and Bernal describe the same garden near Xilotepec. This description is from Gómara: Durmió [Cortés] con todo su ejército en una casa de placer y huerta que tiene una legua, y está de piedra muy bien cercada, que la atraviesa por medio un gentil río. Los del lugar huyeron como fué día, y los nuestros corrieron tras ellos hasta Xilotepec. (2:22) [He (Cortés) stopped that night, with all his army, at a stone pleasure house. It had a garden a square league in extent, enclosed by a wall and watered by a pretty stream that flowed through the middle. The people of the place fled at daybreak and our people pursued them as far as Xilotepec.] (258)

In the middle of Bernal’s fairly faithful transcription of Gómara, we encounter this same garden, which for Gómara is simply worth mentioning because of its size. But Bernal seizes this opportunity to spread his literary wings: Cuando el Capitán Sandoval se vio libre de aquellas refriegas, dio muchas gracias a Dios y se fue a reposar y dormir a una huerta que había en aquel pueblo, la más hermosa y de mayores edificios y cosa mucho de mirar que se avía visto en la Nueva España, así del gran concierto de la diversidad de árboles de todo género de fruta de la tierra y otras muchas rosas y olores; pues los conciertos que en ella había, por donde venía el agua de un río en que ella entraba . . . los ricos aposentos y las labores de ellos y la madera tan olorosa de cedros y otros árboles preciados, salas y cenadores y baños y muchas casas que en ella había, todas encaladas y hermoseadas de mil pinturas; pues los pescaderes y el entretejer de unas ramas con otras, y a una parte las hierbas medicinales, y otras legumbres que entre ellos son buenas de comer . . . Ciertamente era huerta para un gran príncipe. (339, Mercedarian edition) [When Captain Sandoval found himself free from that struggle, he gave thanks to God and went to rest and sleep in an orchard within the town, which was so beautiful and contained such fine buildings that it was the best worth beholding of anything we had seen in New Spain both on the account of the arrangement and diversity of the many kinds of fruit trees and of the roses and other sweet-scented plants, and for the arrangement made for the supply of sweet water from a river which was led into the garden, and the rich chambers . . . and the sweet scented cedar wood and the excellent BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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furniture . . . and the numerous houses, all coated with plaster and adorned with a thousand pictures, and the avenues and the weaving together of the branches, and in the other parts the medicinal herbs and the vegetables, many of them good to eat.] (2:47)

Bernal’s passage is rife with literary resonances. Captain Sandoval could be a figure from Chivalric literature: a Ruggiero lying down in a garden of delights, a Florisante or a Dorisante about to sing in a bucolic pasture. Bernal’s passage also echoes strongly, even ironically, his own description of the since-destroyed Aztec palaces—a description which, in turn, is lifted almost wholesale from Gómara. Perhaps the most significant substitution is that Bernal replaces Gómara’s archetypal hero Cortés with the more humble Captain Sandoval, just one of several lieutenants. As when he gives the flayed soldier’s skin a face, Bernal gives Gómara’s monophonic narrative an individual face and, in doing so, finds his personal voice and begins his individual brand of literature. It would appear that Bernal has quietly overcome his discomfort with literary devices like irony and with literature in general. His plagiarism becomes an act of literary creation.13 Renaissance humanists defined their notion of individuality by entering, on equal footing, into dialogue with classical texts. In effect, the author was authorized through reading. Literary borrowing was a common practice, and Gómara himself borrowed extensively from authors like Herodotus, Polybius, and Plutarch. Bernal alters this strategy somewhat. Instead of engaging with Classical authors like Homer—as a good humanist like Gómara does—Bernal refashions himself through reading his contemporary, Gómara.14 He grows so confident with literary authority that he even challenges Gómara at his own game. In another passage from these later chapters, Bernal chides Gómara for what seems to be a minor point: ‘‘E aquí dize el coronista Gómara en su istoria que, por venir el río tinto en su sangre, los nuestros pasaron sed por causa de la sangre . . . Digamos que . . . venía el agua algo turbia de sangre, y no duró aquella turbieza un Ave-María’’ (341) [Gómara says in his history that our soldiers were parched with thirst because the river ran red with blood . . . (Let us say that) the water became somewhat turbid with blood but the discolouration did not last long] (4:51). The detail in question—blood in the water—is insignificant to the action. Rather, this quarrel is over how to write. It is an editorial dispute between two writers over when and how to be fanciful: Bernal 38


takes Gómara to task for relishing the detail of the blood-filled river a little too much. For a brief moment, the tables are turned. Bernal teaches Gómara a lesson about how to handle those details, ‘‘engañosos y aun muy odiosos’’ [deceitful and even odious], that Gómara says historians should avoid. Bernal’s struggle for independence from Gómara’s authority offers a springboard for discussing a broader struggle for political independence in the Historia verdadera. Almost as soon as the Conquest was over, the victorious conquerors divided the new territory and its inhabitants in a controversial process known as the encomienda. Bernal himself received a sizable allotment. This process did not sit well with the central authorities who arrived soon afterward, however. These authorities went about installing centralized colonial institutions like the church, a viceregal court, and a bureaucracy. They also tried to take back the feudal encomiendas from the old conquerors. The old soldiers, by then living in semifeudal fiefdoms, refused to surrender what they saw as rightfully theirs. Oddly, they became a restless underclass with a real sense of persecution. They threatened numerous revolts.15 Bernal Díaz was among these increasingly marginal veterans. Accordingly, the driving forces of the latter part of the Historia verdadera are anger and fear of losing what is owned. This sense of entropy affects the entire cast of characters. The text is filled with news of appeals to the court, audits, lawsuits, infighting, and various insurrections against Cortés and the viceregal government that succeeded him. Bernal undertakes an anxious personal crusade to reclaim his encomienda and squabbles with newly arrived settlers. He recounts a running fight over treatment of the Indians which ends in a duel and focuses less on the glory days of battle. Even Cortés seems aimless and increasingly pathetic. He tries to top his crowning glory by setting off on stranger and stranger military campaigns to find the next Aztec Empire. Each campaign fails more miserably than the last. Cortés seems trapped in a perpetual attempt to repeat himself. Awash in a sense of decline and of losing a battle against time, the end of the Historia verdadera includes one startling section. It is now 1538, seventeen years after the end of the Conquest. Bernal describes the old soldiers, gathered for one last festivity. The ostensible reason for the celebration is the peace between Francis I and Charles V. But something else is afoot. The description of the events is rich with processions, bullfights, banquets, and richly adorned ladies. During all of this, a series of eerie allegorical masques, which Bernal calls ‘‘invenBERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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çiónes’’ [inventions], turns the Great Plaza of Mexico into an otherworldly place. The plaza is disguised with ‘‘tanta diversidad de árboles como si allí ovieran naçido. Avía en medio unos árboles como questavan caídos de biejos y podridos’’ (607) [a great variety of trees as natural as if they had grown there . . . and in the middle some trees as though they had fallen down from old age and decay] (189–190). Bernal notes that there are deer, rabbits, and hares in artful wooden cages and even stage mold on the stage trees. A hunt takes place; nondescript ‘‘salbajes’’ [savages] chase down released animals; and rival parties of these savages perform an entertaining argument. A tableau vivant floats by, with ‘‘negros y negras con su rey y reina, y todos a cavallo, que eran más de çinquenta, y [con] grandes riquezas . . . sobre sí’’ (608) [negroes and negresses with their king and queen all on horseback, more than fifty in number, and with the great riches which they carried on their persons] (189–190). Then the most startling performance occurs: the plaza becomes a miniature Mediterranean, in which are floating ‘‘quatro navíos con sus masteles y trinquetes y mezanas y velas, y tan al natural, que se enlevanvan en ello algunas personas de . . . ver[los] ir a la vela por mitad de la plaza . . . y venían allí unos indios a bordo vestidos al parecer como frailes dominicos . . . pelando unas gallinas, y otros . . . pescando’’ (608) [four ships with their main and foremasts and mizzens and sails so natural that many persons were astonished at seeing them go under sail across the Plaza . . . and there were some Indians on board dressed to look like Dominican friars . . . skinning chickens and others fishing] (5:191). In the middle of this ocean sits the city of Rhodes, complete with turrets and battlements. Hernán Cortés, of course, assumes the role of Grand Master of Rhodes. Suddenly, there is an ambush by ‘‘dos capitanías de turcos muy al natural a la turquesa, con riquísimos vestidos de seda y de carmesí y grana con mucho oro y ricas caperuças, como ellos traen en su tierra, y todos a cavallo’’ (608) [two companies of Turks were placed in ambuscade, most Turklike with rich silk robes all purple and scarlet and gold, and splendid hoods such as they wear in their country. All of them were on horseback] (5:191). Grand Master Cortés is alerted. After a pitched battle, Cortés successfully repels the attackers and takes many prisoners. The victory causes great rejoicing. This theatrical defense of Rhodes offers numerous resonances with the rest of the Historia verdadera: the mock battles recall the endless, and very real, battles fought on that same plaza. Cortés’s foot-wound 40


echoes the leg wound he received in the final fight to capture the city. These resonances give the sense that the performance is a summation, a valedictory reunion for the Conquest. The old conquistadores, going to seed, have gathered to celebrate a transition from one war to another. All the military battles have already been fought, but the ominous war for recognition of their role and their rewards is just beginning. A reenactment of an event half a world away and sixty years in the past, this siege of Rhodes on the Plaza at the heart of Mexico City is in fact a ritualized, symbolic battle to stop time. This performance, with its fanciful sets and strange inversions, is what cultural anthropology calls a rite of passage. Rites of passage are celebrated during times of change, both good and bad—birth, ascension, initiation into adulthood, death. Recall Turner’s assessment that the liminality invoked during rites of passage creates a topsy-turvy place ‘‘neither here nor there’’ and that its inhabitants find themselves ‘‘betwixt and between the positions assigned . . . by law, custom, convention and ceremonial’’ (Ritual Process, 95). Examples of rites of passage include carnival and its mock coronations, which Bakhtin explores; African bleeding houses in which young girls are quarantined during their first menses; and festive Irish wakes. All such rites are confined within liminal space. Their participants are deliberately placed in a parallel, upside-down world. They are outside looking in (Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, 135). Naturally, this upside-down theatrical place is only temporary, since the liminal is built to be abandoned: initiates always return to society. Although Bakhtin would argue that the liminal carnivalesque is countercultural as well as revolutionary, in a deeply fundamental sense the very purpose of the liminal is conservative. Rites of passage (including their disruptive, liminal phase) are meant to reinvigorate a society through contemplation from the outside, through healthy parody, and, most importantly, through the certainty of a return to the mainstream. Social norms are suspended during the liminal phase, but its residents look forward to reassimilation in a new role. Confirmants return as fullfledged men or women. Single people return married. And the dead are released to the afterlife. The reunion of the old veterans in the plaza, with its festivities and mock battles, announces the upside-down world of liminal theatricality: Aztecs become blacks, Indians are dressed as Dominicans, and the center of the city becomes a classical forest. Under the pretext of celebrating the peace between the two European kings, the old soldiers surreptitiously celebrate their arrival into old age. During the event, BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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they forget their differences, their lawsuits, and their fear. For this fanciful performance, Bernal’s insistence on the hard facts is suspended, a fitting gesture given his recently found comfort with artifice. Historical time is now mythic. The old soldiers’ rite of passage can also be read as a final and futile attempt to contain their losses. They resort to liminal space as a last refuge in which to preserve their moment of victory and their spoils of war from inevitable entropy. They try to stop the ravages of time. The performances in the plaza both enact and alter many powerful fictions. The spectacle replays the victorious defense of Rhodes of 1480, during which Christian knights repelled Ottoman attackers. This victory stands in sharp contrast to the veterans’ recent string of failures. So the show consoles its actors. The performance also transforms Cortés and his soldiers from conquistador-attackers into defenders of the besieged city. The siege mentality of the mock battle compulsively repeats the veterans’ recent embattled position, which they have been forced to defend against the encroaching bureaucracy. But in another sense their dual role as both conquerors and defenders encapsulates the soldiers’ entire experience. This duality existed already in the opening chapters of the Historia verdadera; for when Cortés and his army shipped out of Cuba and landed on the shores of Mexico, they did so in open defiance of the governor of Cuba. Bernal narrates in Chapter 42 how in an inspired tactical stroke the soldiers conceive a plan to declare the fort of San Juan de Ulúa an independent cabildo (town council). They elect each other councilmen and make Cortés governor-general. In effect, they declare a kind of independence from Cuba by vowing to answer to no one but the king, who is, conveniently, months of travel time away. Their stagey gesture of independence established a kind of liminal space, also betwixt and between law, custom, and convention. Most importantly, it bought them time. This period of rebellious liminality lasted just long enough to carry out the Conquest; although it ended when the bureaucrats and churchmen came and took over, the conquerors had experienced a taste of freedom. They launched a new war to preserve all that was gained during that suspended state. In anthropological terms, the old soldiers resisted their reincorporation from the liminal state. In fact the whole Historia verdadera—including both Bernal’s Oedipal struggle with Gómara and the aging soldiers’ challenge to the authorities—can be read as a perpetual mock-battle, much like the one 42


in the Grand Plaza. Like the performance that evening, the book attempts to come to terms with reality through high artifice. As several other projects chronicled within it had done before, the Historia verdadera works to extend the chaotic freedom of liminality forever.16 Unfortunately for them, the soldiers eventually learned the hard way that they were not in an eternal carnival. Their autonomy, which had begun when they cut themselves off from Cuba and from the rule of law, could not last forever. The Crown and its bureaucrats would prevail: after all, Rhodes finally fell to the Turks. Bernal’s struggle for literary independence thus assumes the utmost importance. His last hope is that the magical and triumphant times of victory and unity can survive within liminal space, in the stagey fictional space of artifice. As Bernal says in the last words he wrote, the only thing that can be salvaged from this failure is the story itself, or at least his and his comrades’ version of it, independent of competing authorities like Gómara and the Crown: ‘‘no tengo otra riqueza que dejar a mis hijos y descendientes, salvo esta mi verdadera y notable relación’’ (xxxv) [I have gained nothing of value to leave my children and descendants, but this my true story] (1:3).17 Bernal’s struggle for aesthetic independence from Gómara is the last battle in the veterans’ fight for recognition and independence. Bernal and the rest of the veterans were unable to maintain their separate world, so his battle becomes a battle for literary autonomy and for relevance. The Historia verdadera is all about carving a viable space for oneself in the world as well as in literature. Doomed from the outset, the first of these battles is failure; it is an impossible fight against time, entropy, and the government: death and taxes are indeed inevitable. For this reason, the stakes are raised for Bernal in the remaining fight for literary space, since victory, or so he believes, means immortality. In one of the last chapters of the Historia verdadera, Bernal shows himself finally free to write literature rather than simply ‘‘true history.’’ He engages in an extremely fanciful ubi sunt dialogue with Fame: [La fama] pregunta que donde están nuestros palaçios y moradas, y que blasones tenemos en ellas diferençiadas de las demás, y si están en ellas esculpidos y puestos por memoria nuestros eroicos hechos de armas . . . donde están sus sepulcros y qué blasones tienen en ellos . . . Y los sepulcros que me pregunta dónde los tienen, digo que son los vientres de los indios, que los comieron las piernas e muslos, e braços e molledos, y pies y manos . . . Lo que a mí se me figura con letras de oro avían de estar escritos sus nonbres. (652) BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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[Fame inquires: ‘‘Where are our palaces and mansions? And what coats of arms distinguish them from the others? . . . Are our heroic deeds and arms carved on them and placed as a memorial?’’ . . . If you ask me the whereabouts of their tombs, I say that they are the bellies of the Indians, who ate their legs and thighs, arms and flesh, and feet and hands . . . It seems to me that their names should be written in letters of gold.] (5:274–275)

The wish for literal gold has proven to be in vain, so Bernal must commit himself to ‘‘letras de oro’’ [letters of gold], the figural gold of representation, with which he fashions for himself and for his comrades the most elaborate memorial he can. The question of whether or not Bernal won this final battle raises the issue of the place of the Historia verdadera within literary history and ultimately its status as a foundational fiction of Mexico. As the above-quoted passage attests, a layer of loneliness underlies the loud outrage of the Historia verdadera. On one level, this is hardly surprising in a book that is essentially a war memorial. But there are other reasons for this loneliness. The hermetic Historia verdadera is not a book meant for others, notes the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio (Le rêve mexicain, 6). In the Historia verdadera wars become internecine struggles; the struggle for land and for recognition fades into the lonely work of the writer trying to gain aesthetic independence and to carve a space of his own in order to memorialize the fallen—‘‘lo que a mí se me figura con letras de oro’’ (652) [it seems to me that their names should be written in letters of gold] (5:275). Critics from Stephen Gilman to Stephen Greenblatt have scrutinized the Historia verdadera to see how the self mediates the other and how the European mind had to expand to accommodate the idea of the New World.18 Yet in many ways Bernal mediates not between self and other but primarily between self and self—as is the case for Cortés, caught in the compulsion to repeat. The pathos of the Historia verdadera results not so much from encountering otherness—as is the case with meticulous cataloguers fascinated with native culture, like Bernardino de Sahagún. Nor does pathos arise from the hybridization of Spanish and Indian cultures as it does for later mestizo writers like the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernando de Alva Ixtlixóchitl. Rather, the pathos of Bernal’s struggle comes from within, for its enemies are entirely internal and Spanish: more than the Aztecs, the enemies are Gómara, the viceregal bureaucracy, and Bernal’s own limitations in the face of time which is quickly running out. 44


The Historia verdadera is an internal memorandum, an isolationist text on many levels. It epitomizes Alfonso Reyes’s idea that the early chronicles of Conquest harbor the seeds of American independence.19 The Historia verdadera resonates with the paradoxical wish to be heard yet at the same time be left alone, by the bureaucracy as well as by posterity. The book is not meant for others, or at least not in the way that Gómara thinks history should be exemplary. Unlike Gómara’s hagiography, Bernal’s history is neither constructed from ideal models nor driven by universals. The Historia verdadera loudly proclaims unflattering and often cumbersome particulars. The events it relates may have been grand and impressive, but at its very core the work conforms to human scale, in the ‘‘deceitful and odious’’ detail scorned by Gómara. The feats of the Historia verdadera impress readers not because they are larger than life but because they are unique, impossible to repeat both literally and narratively. ‘‘Hay mucho que ponderar en ello que no sé cómo lo cuente: ver cosas nunca oídas, ni aun soñadas, como veíamos’’ (175) [There is so much to consider that I do not know how I will tell of it: to see things never before heard about, nor even dreamed, as we then saw], Bernal writes, meaning that he had never seen anything like the Conquest before. This event had a deeper impact upon him and upon his 608 comrades than it ever could have had on the anonymous sweep of humanity. Carlos Fuentes labels Bernal’s book a failed epic, an interesting point on many counts (Valiente mundo nuevo, 79–91). The work of epic is to elevate war to a mythic scale, giving enough universal resonance to the actions of men and arms to found a nation.20 The Historia verdadera functions exactly in reverse. Its insistences—on recent memory, on overwhelming detail, and on the failures of the whole enterprise—are at odds with the sweeping universalities of myth. Bernal’s attempt to stop time applies to his resistance against the universalizing and mythic scale of epic. Yet the Historia verdadera still has functioned as a foundational epic of Mexico and all of Latin America. Bernal’s hermetic inward-looking spirit, its separatist overtones, and its failures have become a kind of master narrative. Its legacy resurfaces after Independence in Latin America’s tragic quest for national self-definition. In Simón Bolívar and José Enrique Rodó in the nineteenth century, and in José Vasconcelos and especially Octavio Paz in the twentieth century, Bernal’s paradoxical wish to be left alone, yet recognized, echoes deeply. The Historia verdadera’s conflicting role of resisting canonization on Gómara’s terms while at the same time beBERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO’S WAR TO STOP TIME

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coming a foundational cornerstone amounts to a compromised victory, a failure threaded with success. An Aztec myth which Bernal probably never heard reflects on the indebtedness, and the frailty, of certain victories: After they had made these images on paper, they dyed them green. They gathered and began discussing: Where are we going? We will simply go to war! We are few now. . . . Let us gather these papers that those from Culhuacan have been bringing. Let us gather them all. And they gathered all the papers and smeared them with amaranth-seed paste, and made a mass with those papers. They pressed that mass and from that made his head. Then they presented him. They begin their dance and their song and beating their oars. A song is made for him: ‘‘. . . Born is our Paper Conqueror!’’ —ANALES DE LA NACIÓN MEXICANA (1528) (QUOTED IN GARIBAY KINTANA, LA LITERATURA, 39--40)

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PART 2

Visions of a New Nation


CHAPTER 2

Compromised Free Markets in El Periquillo Sarniento TEACHERS, ALBUREROS, AND OTHER SHOUTERS

For many readers, El Periquillo Sarniento (1816) by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827) represents one of the first true ‘‘Americanizations’’ of a European mode—in this case, the picaresque. Benedict Anderson points out that the pícaro’s traditional social fluidity allows him or her to travel freely across social and class boundaries in order to scrutinize the assets of the new land, its ‘‘hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes,’’ thereby offering a cross-sectional inventory of an essential Mexican nationhood (Imagined Communities, 30). Like Humboldt’s Essai politique (1811), El Periquillo takes stock of the new Republic, determining what is valuable and to whom it belongs. In a similar vein, Antonio Benítez-Rojo sees Lizardi’s novel as an instrument of class solidification, reflecting Lizardi’s ‘‘desire to build a solid bourgeois home for the criollo,’’ the caste of American-born Spaniards perpetually stuck just below Iberianborn Spaniards in the hierarchy (‘‘José Joaquín,’’ 338). Indeed, a sense of responsibility to the patria, especially to his criollo class, unifies all of Lizardi’s work. Lizardi wished his headstone to read that he had served his patria as best he could; like the Venezuelan statesmanscholar Andrés Bello (1781–1865), he envisioned this contribution as that of a national educator. All of Lizardi’s works—from his voluminous journalistic output to his broadsheet diatribes, his ‘‘mood pieces’’ like the Cadalso-like Noches tristes (1818), and his satiric novels like Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1832) and La Quijotita (1818)—take to heart the Horatian imperative to please and instruct. They are brimming with the wish to be representative and educational. The purpose of El Periquillo Sarniento, as for most of Lizardi’s work, as Benítez-Rojo puts it, is ‘‘to correct the moral defects he saw among the middle class criollos’’ (‘‘José Joaquín,’’ 331). Lizardi’s educational mission, however, goes beyond correcting moral defects. Indirectly, his educational goal is to teach criollos their role and their limits in society.

Yet we find a remarkable exception in the middle of El Periquillo’s project to educate the decent middle class: there is also a frank and realistic depiction of Mexican street life. The novel’s ‘‘photographic’’ representation of the everyday life of cardsharps, beggars, and prisoners forced into military service has often earned El Periquillo the rubric of costumbrismo in the grand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish tradition of artists like the painter Francisco de Goya and the writer Mariano de Larra. When Perico first descends into the underworld of rakes and hucksters, he is led by his old schoolmate Januario, a vulgar Virgil who, like Perico, is a criollo fallen from his proper place in society. When Januario tells Perico that he will instruct him in ‘‘los términos más comunes y trillados de la dialéctica leperuna’’ (354) [the most common and tested terms of the rude dialectic], this dialéctica leperuna turns out to be a rich archive of plebeian and regional dialects, cadences of street denizens (léperos), technical vocabulary of shysters and journeymen, beggars and highwaymen, and even the occasional phrase in Indian languages. Discussing this unique dimension of the novel, Jean Franco claims that the main agenda is control: it intends to subjugate the voices of the masses under what she calls ‘‘the Golden Mean of the mercantile society, in which it is necessary to have a certain mutual trust among all the contractual participants.’’ The street voices, according to Franco, are commodified. They are like ‘‘different products in a store,’’ ultimately owned by the paternalistic narrator who writes, after his conversion, from a place of middle-class stability (‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa,’’ 33).1 I would agree with the observation that the dynamics of the novel echo those of the marketplace. But I would add that—instead of being like the products for sale in a bourgeois almacén—the colorful voices within El Periquillo reflect a more nuanced, and changing, commercial landscape. The patronizing storekeeper/narrator that Franco sees in this jumble of competing sounds does not quite possess the unchallenged voice of the master, for that is changing as well. The vulgar voices of El Periquillo are in an uneasy coexistence with its high-minded sermons. The novel is full of virtuous characters’ longwinded attempts to instruct Perico (and the reader); but these hegemonic, teacherly voices are often challenged.While El Periquillo is first and foremost a novel of education, it is also a novel of failed education: many of the moral examples and exhortations simply do not capture Perico sufficiently, as his numerous schemes attest. On a narrative level, the costumbrista postcards from the underworld scattered 50

VISIONS OF A NEW NATION

throughout El Periquillo tend to be more compelling than the moralizing exhortations; and as a result the wish to instruct the middle classes about the dangers of the barbarie is a complicated impulse that often undermines itself. For Andrés Bello, the paradigmatic Latin American teacher/nationbuilder of the period, in his Gramática de la lengua castellana (1847), enlightened empire and language were intertwined and a unified linguistic front was a matter of survival. He expressed the fear that if all the regional variations of the language flourished unchecked, American Spanish would degenerate into a ‘‘multitud de dialectos irregulares, licenciosos, bárbaros, embriones de idiomas futuros’’ (‘‘Prólogo,’’ 160) [a multitude of irregular, licentious, and barbaric dialects, embryos of future languages]. His hope was to see a new Spanish Empire in the Americas, through a unified language, avoid the same fate as Ancient Rome (and perhaps also the fate of the old Spanish Empire, which had been unable to hold onto its colonies). But this wish for a unified bourgeois cultural identity has historically proven to be double-edged, too often ending in the countless acts of absolutism and repression that have plagued Latin America. Indeed many of the criollo champions of a strong, unified voice often found their own voices challenged, if not in outright danger—the teachers themselves were often taught harsh lessons, quite frequently in front of the students. Lizardi himself, for example, was censored and even imprisoned on various occasions for his outspoken opinions. But the fraught relationship between power and language documented in El Periquillo makes the clear point that hegemony, and any attempt to overpower all other voices, can be subject to competition. This competition is very specific: in the last decades of the eighteenth century in which El Periquillo is set, a momentous economic and political change had just occurred. The decrees of comercio libre (free trade) had been enacted in 1778 by the Bourbon Crown in an attempt to jump-start the Spanish economy and to consolidate power. Although in the Americas these reforms would soon be overshadowed by the Wars of Independence, in this project of consolidation the Bourbons challenged other entrenched, and powerful, institutions like the church and the trade guilds that had long enjoyed powers parallel to those of the Crown: they had their own legal systems—fueros—as well as virtual deadlocks on various segments of commerce. The Bourbons attempted their consolidation of power, paradoxically enough, by liberalizing sectors of the economy previously monopolized, including COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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trade between Spain and the colonies. In New Spain specifically, Basque or Asturian montañeses had traditionally dominated the supply routes for more than a century. With the decrees of 1778, these monopolies were suddenly no longer the exclusive traders of Spanish goods. The result was the ascendancy of a new class of independent local merchants in provincial cities like Guadalajara and Veracruz who began to distribute goods directly to the provinces instead of going first through the clearinghouses in the capital.2 (Claudio Veliz makes the intriguing case that the resulting clash between liberalizing and centralist forces with regard to trade eventually transmogrified into the dominant trope of Latin American culture since Independence—the opposition of urban vs. agrarian, ‘‘civilization’’ vs. ‘‘barbarism’’ [Centralist Tradition, 125– 162].) We encounter evidence of these sea-changes in El Periquillo in the character of Don Antonio Sánchez (a criollo merchant that Perico meets in prison), who tells Perico his life story as an inset novela ejemplar (400–439). After some setbacks and much hard work in the port of Veracruz (only recently opened to nonguild trade), Don Antonio decides to try his luck in Mexico City. At a party, a certain Spanish nobleman sets his eyes on Don Antonio’s wife. Scheming to get Don Antonio to abandon the city and his wife, the marquis offers Antonio a shipment of Spanish goods to sell in the provinces. Unaware of the nobleman’s dark designs on his native-born criolla or mestiza wife (whom Don Antonio describes as ‘‘una de aquellas muchachas que ustedes los mexicanos llaman payas’’ [404] [one of those girls that you Mexicans call country girls]), Don Antonio gratefully accepts the offer and leaves the city on his errand. When the virtuous native wife resists the advances of the marquis, he takes out his frustrations on Don Antonio by having him arrested for fraud. The conflict between Don Antonio and the Spanish marquis, inconceivable a few years before, is emblematic: Don Antonio is one of the criollo entrepreneurs taking advantage of the opportunities created in the provinces by the decree of 1778 and obviously not one of the montañeses with a hereditary stranglehold on Mexico City trade. A clear threat to the wealthy merchants, when he tries to break into the Mexico City monopolies, he is stopped by one of the oligarchic montañeses who covets his most cherished possession, his native wife. This contest is over ownership of the local resources but also over trade for imported ones: Antonio has no manufactured goods to sell: his only commodities are his wife and his wits.3

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Franco’s observation that the novel represents the ‘‘golden mean of mercantile society’’ becomes more complicated when we take into account that this very ‘‘mercantile society’’ is in a state of flux; suddenly it was possible for small-scale, provincial criollo merchants to expand their prospects—and as a consequence the worldviews of all nativeborn criollos also expanded. For these second-class citizens it became imaginable to strike out on their own. In El Periquillo as well as in Lizardi’s journalistic work, we encounter a colonial society in the process of revising its conception of itself and finding venues for its changing fortunes. But the story of Don Antonio also underscores a crucial aspect of the decrees of 1778: despite the optimistic sense of self-determination, the actual reinvention only went so far. The historian John Fisher has recently and convincingly questioned the traditional notion that Independence was a direct result of the Bourbon decrees of ‘‘free trade.’’ This view held that the shift in the colonial commerce led to the invigoration of the criollo middle class, which in turn led ultimately to a nascent criollo sense of self-determination: what had begun in the commercial sphere spilled into the political. Its direct result was the birth of an independent Mexico. As Fisher has shown in a compelling review of the historical data, the reality is somewhat darker. Fundamental changes did indeed happen: the routes and principal players were rearranged (from montañeses to more localized criollos, from lucrative protected trade routes to ‘‘unsanctioned’’ smuggling with foreigners), but the dynamics of ultramarine trade itself, and the underlying power structures that upheld it, remained relatively intact and unchallenged. The supposed reforms, while they did occur, produced no overarching change other than a rearrangement in the upper reaches of trade. ‘‘The commercial ‘freedom’ defined by the 1778 reglamento,’’ writes Fisher, ‘‘was a strictly limited one’’ (‘‘Imperial Free Trade,’’ 22). It was part of a larger design on the part of the metropolis to reinvigorate its own interests, and it did not really result in a fundamental shift in the balance of power. As Andrew Bush argues about the similarities between poetry and commerce during this period, the ‘‘coarse’’—the native-spun, both language and cloth—began to appear in the trade routes from the metropolis to the periphery, marking the beginning of modernity (Routes, 26–27). But the trade routes themselves, and the structures and energies that maintained them, remained unchallenged.

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RUDE DIALOGUES But no sooner were my Eyes open, than I saw my Poll sitting on the Top of the Hedge; and immediately knew that it was he that spoke to me; for just in such bemoaning Language I had used to talk to him, and teach him and he had learn’d it so perfectly. —DANIEL DEFOE, ROBINSON CRUSOE (112)

El que es perico dondequiera es verde, y el que es pendejo dondequiera pierde. [He who is a parrot is everywhere green, He who is a fool will always lose.] —REFRAIN USED BY LOTERÍA CALLERS AT FAIRS 4

It is not surprising that since the El Periquillo is essentially the story of an education, its principal non-narrative sources should be moral and legal treatises, catechisms, and didactic dialogues. Likewise, its main narrative models are other stories of education—for instance, the exemplary picaresques of Alain Le Sage’s L’histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715), which Lizardi read in Father José Francisco de Isla’s Spanish translation of 1787, and Diego de Torres Villarroel’s Vida (1743) as well as works like François de Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699). Most importantly, as Jefferson Rea Spell established a generation ago, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theories on education broadly inform Lizardi’s work (Bridging the Gap, 93, 158). In Rousseau’s Emile (1762), there is a small but telling parenthesis to this author’s view that human nature is essentially good but can be corrupted by the excesses of ‘‘civilization.’’ The ironically antibookish teacher-narrator of Emile allows his student only one book: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) (Emile, 184). In Defoe’s novel Crusoe seeks adventure in order to escape his inevitable place in life—the bourgeois ‘‘middle station.’’ He finds himself shipwrecked on a desert island, where he creates an economy of one and carves a materialist existence precisely like the one he spent half a lifetime dreading. Robinson Crusoe is a technical manual on how to survive comfortably on one’s own labor, but it is also a primer for the bourgeoisie on how to accept its providential destiny, how to make peace with the manifest pull of one’s ‘‘proper’’ place in society. The novel becomes a happy ledger of things accomplished, built, and accumulated: a record of successful materiality gathered with a clear conscience. Ultimately and in spite of himself Crusoe in his solitude re54


invents the very ‘‘middle station,’’ the comfortable bourgeois stasis that he had tried so hard to escape. It is an established convention that the development of the novel is tied to the rise of commerce. Indeed, the narrator of the first modern novel—Don Quijote—purchases the loose pages of his story from a vendor, placing the originary source firmly in the marketplace.5 Critics from Ian Watt to Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson have long noted that the eighteenth-century roots of both the modern novel and the bourgeoisie are deeply intertwined; the new merchant class and its values had a strong influence on both the form and ethics of the new genre. Watt establishes that during the eighteenth century, as women began reading and lending libraries became commonplace, a small but growing merchant class suddenly found its acquisitive power approaching that of the landed classes. This middle class began aping the customs and trappings of the gentry but could not share its precise cultural capital. The rise of the novel mirrored the rise of this novel social class, and at its very heart was a problem of mimesis: the project of looking like gentry was mirrored in the project of looking like literature.6 Likewise, commentators of the picaresque form have seen in its development a related shift toward the values of the nascent middle class. The original sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pícaros like the Lazarillo de Tormes or Guzmán de Alfarache are typically solitary and antisocial, and their narratives are troubling and often seditious existential statements. But by the eighteenth century these antisocial figures cease embodying a nihilistic worldview and instead become part of an optimistic cautionary tale. ‘‘Happy endings’’ abound in the eighteenth-century picaresque. The Enlightenment pícaro’s reversals and hard knocks are not so much the result of his or her nihilism, selfdestructive pragmatism, or generally antisocial behavior but rather because of innocence and credulity. As is the case for the original pícaro, the eighteenth-century pícaro displays a stubborn determination to exist parasitically; but now this determinism is tempered by an optimistic ‘‘stoical refusal to give in to adversity,’’ as Alexander Blackburn explains (Myth, 116). In this later version of the genre, the pícaro’s ultimate virtue is ‘‘responsible individuality’’; but unlike the original pícaro he is ultimately rewarded and ‘‘integrated into society’’ as an honnête homme (Blackburn, Myth, 118). As the British Hispanist Alexander Parker says of Le Sage’s Gil Blas, ‘‘roguery exists not in him but in the world around him’’ (Literature, 121). Invigorated by Hobbesian optimism, adherence to the middle station of life, and belief in the posCOMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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sibility of salvation for all, the new pícaro finds opportunities to show virtue even in crime, since there are ‘‘right as well as wrong ways of being a confidence man’’ (Blackburn, Myth, 116).7 In Gil Blas we see this newly formed relationship between virtue and money and its reflection on the picaresque educational model of how to outwit the world. In the introduction the narrator invokes a familiar picaresque setting—the road to Salamanca—to offer an anecdote about two traveling students. The students rest by the side of the road, where they spy a rock inscribed with the words ‘‘The Soul of the Licenciate Pedro Garcias is here enclosed’’ (Preface, no pagination). While one of the students disregards the inscription as a foolish epitaph, the other immediately smells an opportunity. This second student finds an excuse to stay behind and digs underneath the stone, where he finds a bag of money and a note in Latin congratulating the finder: ‘‘Be thou my Heir, thou who hast Wit enough to find out the Meaning of the Inscription, and make better use of my Money than I did’’ (Preface). The essential goodness of the ‘‘soul’’ is indistinguishable from hard cash. Both are equally worthy prizes for a perceptive young man to pursue. The cunning demonstrated by the youth in order to reach these prizes points to an important operating principle of the honnête homme of the new merchant class: getting ahead involves a contest of wits, in a process where there is no disjunctive between becoming rich and becoming virtuous. Competition, in short, is good— or so it would seem. In this vein, a sense of competition complicates Perico’s progress. His foiled educations—for he goes through several—are in competition with one another. His many teachers, vocations, and pursuits vie for Perico’s attention, but he does not easily ‘‘buy’’ any of their lines. As his name indicates, Perico is a parrot, an imitator who retains just enough to get by.8 Throughout most of his life, he never learns from the numerous sermons issued for his benefit or even from his own repeated mistakes: he ignores the lessons of his father; he learns little at school; and his frequent beatings, losses of property, and incarcerations do not really make him change much, despite occasional crises of conscience. Perico’s dullness, a form of what Bakhtin calls a typical eighteenthcentury ‘‘device of ‘not understanding,’ ’’ is meant to highlight the injustices of the world, as in Voltaire’s Candide (Dialogic Imagination, 164). His dullness is unusual in that—however resistant he is to attempts to educate him—he retains an almost overwhelming amount of details, if never the ‘‘big picture.’’ For instance, despite his mother’s 56


vehement wish that he avoid all things technical—he often blames this imperative for his life of laziness—Perico’s life turns out to be a series of technical apprenticeships. He eventually studies all the manual trades that horrified her (shopkeeping, soldiering, manual labor) as well as some outright criminal ones that she could not even have imagined. Although he studies, he never really learns the trades properly, remaining unable to draw up a competent legal document after his apprenticeship as a law clerk (not to mention being unable to respect the law). But he can rattle off extensive case precedents and legal trivia. Likewise, he can recite minutiae about Roman history, natural philosophy, pharmacopoeia, and anatomy—even his dying breath is a pedantic little lesson about the anatomy of dying breaths: Diles que tenemos dos cañones en la garganta llamados esófago y laringe. Por el uno pasa aire al pulmón, por el otro alimento al estómago . . . Cuando tragamos tapamos con una valvulita que se llama glotis el cañón del aire . . . Cuando la agua, verbigracia, que se ha ido al pulmón pesa más que el aire que hay dentro, se ahoga el paciente. (927–928) [Tell them that we have two passages in our throats called the esophagus and the pharynx. Air passes through one, food through the other . . . When we swallow, in truth we block the air passage with a little valve called the ‘‘glottis’’ . . . When any water that has gone into the lung weighs more than the air inside, the patient will drown.]

The technical specifics gleaned from his various educations stick with Perico, without a sense of their consequences and accompanying duties or (as we see from the scene above) their relevance. He indeed is a repeating parrot. Likewise, he can on occasion mimic a ‘‘moral’’ individual and repents in a heartfelt manner when confronted with his misdeeds; but these moments are short-lived. He seems captivated by the trivia, by the bric-a-brac and minutiae, without grasping their larger implications. Perico’s learning disability is due in part to the contest itself, the bricolage of voices all trying to persuade him. This extreme of give-and-take, the novel suggests, can create a relativistic vacuum where no single voice is a compelling authority, one that forces him to scavenge apparently meaningless bits and pieces. Even some of the virtuous father figures cheat, like the criollo merchant Don Antonio. His first large shipping deal, which he acknowledges nonchalantly was a smuggling operation, goes sour not because COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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it was wrong but rather because others cheated him. He offers no excuse or apology for breaking the law but simply mentions it to Perico as an example of the kind of injustice that can bring down a good man, a modern honnête homme simply trying to do the (dis)honest, profitable thing. The aggressive but centerless didacticism scatters more than educates Perico, and the resulting tug-of-war shapes him more than any single moral framework or worldview. As a consequence Perico receives a prodigious, if superficial, amount of information about various pursuits and professions, grasps some specialized jargon and some occasional practical advice, but builds no overarching code of conduct or moral compass. Perico’s dilemma is an enactment of the ambiguous freedom of ‘‘free trade.’’ Once use value yields to exchange value— when the flow of commerce itself is more important than protecting the interests of any single merchant like the montañeses—it is difficult to maintain a moral frame for that commerce or to assign any intrinsic value. As mentioned earlier, much critical attention has been given to El Periquillo for its startling record of the specific sounds and sights of Mexican street life circa 1800. The presence of these voices is usually discussed through the filters of Marxism and postcolonialism, in reference to the historical conditions surrounding the decline of the Spanish Empire in the Americas.9 Yet, whatever their ideological or historical preoccupations, the many critics who have commented on El Periquillo fairly agree that the novel is double-voiced. The coexistence of the rude dialéctica leperuna alongside heavily didactic sermonizing creates a split effect and has led some to regard the presence of the sermons as an imperfection. In fact the only English translation of El Periquillo, edited by Katherine Ann Porter in the 1940s, actually eliminated them, leaving a short and funny, Tobias Smollett-like picaresque.10 Indeed reading El Periquillo produces a sense of oscillation between Perico’s activities and the extensive (and to the modern reader tedious) homilies against just this kind of activity, delivered by what Jean Franco calls ‘‘padrinos,’’ teacherly characters with moral high ground. Among the most expansive of these virtuous characters is the reformed Perico himself, who from his deathbed dictates his life story to his children, accompanying the accounts of his youthful debauchery with warnings and even with footnotes. Perico often begins his nasty episodes with apologetic tags like ‘‘y yo, como buen bobo’’ (448) [I, like a perfect fool].

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The humorous stories from his unreformed early years are meant in principle to warn against the folly of ignoring sound advice, since these episodes usually end badly for him. But in fact his long foray into the underworld is a temporary interlude. As desperate and irrevocable as his fall into the lower reaches of society looks to him, his long exercise in debauchery is a case study in the inescapability of the middle station, the same inevitable path that finds Crusoe even in his faraway island. Perico undergoes a life-changing fall from social status; but like his many educations, this fall does not ‘‘stick’’: he ultimately returns to the fold. Yet the fact remains that the road back to the middle station is punctuated by some very convincing lowlifes who give pause in this long, strange trip back to respectability. These characters offer powerful justifications for their way of life. The relativistic seesaw between boilerplate advice to behave well and the vivid examples of bad behavior casts doubt on both. The ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ characters are equally powerful arguers for both ways of life. Although there are many sermons exhorting Perico to be good, these discourses are frequently paired with a sort of sermon in defense of bad behavior, pronounced by dubious characters like Perico’s dissolute childhood friends Januario and Martín Pelayo. These characters hear Perico’s summaries of the various moral lessons (they never witness these themselves) and then present rebuttals against what they consider callow, naïve, or simply impractical guidance. Although they never quite carry the persuasive force of the moralists, they mock their content and style just enough to create doubt in Perico’s mind, throwing him into a state of confusion. When Perico shows Januario a letter from his dying father, containing a final exhortation, Januario’s reply sounds just as earthy and commonsensical as the old man’s: Le manifesté a Januario la carta de mi padre, y él luego . . . se echó a reír y me dijo: —Está bueno el sermón, no hay que hacer . . . Pero consejos y bigotes, dicen que ya no se usan . . . Si como tu padre te dejó advertencias te hubiera dejado monedas, se las deberías de agradecer más, porque, amigo, porque un peso duro vale más que diez gruesas de consejos. (268) [I showed Januario my father’s letter, and he then . . . started laughing and said to me: ‘‘That’s a pretty good sermon, no doubt about it . . . But as they


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say about advice and mustaches, they are out of fashion . . . If your father had left you coins the way he left you warnings, you would be more thankful because, friend, a hard peso is worth more than ten bales of advice.’’]

This pattern of argument and rebuttal via a confused Periquillo creates a distorted didactic dialogue. Unlike many critics’ monophonic reading of the novel, where one of the competing voices is clearly hegemonic and disciplines all the others, the ‘‘master narrative’’ of El Periquillo Sarniento seems to be a rhetorical constant not an ethical one: the moralists and the immoralists are almost equally convincing, despite the haze of irony casting doubts on the validity of both. The resulting oddly amoral relativism of most of El Periquillo raises the question of what exactly the lesson truly is. Even in terms of genre the novel is caught in a tug of war between conflicting visions, between the earlier nihilistic picaresque of poverty and violence and the optimistic Enlightenment picaresque of ‘‘responsible individuality.’’ That El Periquillo is didactic is not in question; what is in question is what precisely it teaches, given its singularly contentious environment. Contention and education are not strangers. The traditional educational genre, the didactic dialogue, features a type of contest (appropriately for a self-proclaimed educator, Lizardi employed this genre often: for example, the entertaining satirical discourses between a bumpkin payo and a church sexton or sacristán, where these two clueless simpletons argue about important issues like constitutional law and prison reform and manage to reach astounding insights).11 In its unironic form, the didactic dialogue is a tool of pious and instructive literature familiar since the Middle Ages: these dialogues served just about every field, including the law, practical subjects like etiquette and husbandry, medicine, and hunting, as well as church doctrine, history, moral instruction, grammar, and so on. A few of this type of dialogues are inset into El Periquillo itself: for instance, in the prologue to the second volume, where the narrator discourses with ‘‘Conocimiento’’ (Knowledge), in a familiar allegorical conceit. Meant as a teaching tool that offers illustrative scenarios, these dialogues usually feature a wise and benevolent authority who answers the questions of an ephebe: during the Renaissance characters would simply be named ‘‘Maestro’’ [Master] and ‘‘Discípulo’’ [Student]. The cast of characters and the level of philosophical engagement can vary widely, but the plot is essentially always the same: it is a scene of instruction, in which the interlocutors talk and listen and then modify their beliefs, convinced 60


either by proof or by the sheer force of the argument. Characterization is minimal, since quite often the interlocutors are merely simplistic tools representing general traits: ‘‘Hunter,’’ ‘‘Servant,’’ ‘‘Memory,’’ and ‘‘Wisdom’’ are typical figures (Gómez, El diálogo, 22–58). Most importantly, didactic dialogues are typically friendly debates more in the spirit of a colloquium or a classroom, meant to instruct the innocent or to reaffirm the already known. The contest is one of knowledge versus innocence carried out gently, rather than through the litigiousness of cross-examinations, interrogations, or Socratic exchanges, with their complex psychological and philosophical endgames. This is an appropriate attribute, given that the goal is to transmit doctrine peacefully by showing how much sense it makes, instead of questioning it or fighting about it.12 Interestingly, in El Periquillo there are several scenes of instruction that follow traditional didactic dialogues but abandon the typically friendly terms, as we see in the scoffing exchanges between the degenerate Januario and Perico’s reasonable father. These scenes of unfriendly instruction are unusual because they involve a teacher being taught a harsh lesson. While Perico is still a schoolboy, his barely literate schoolmaster misplaces a comma, which corrupts the meaning of a prayer to the Virgin; the hapless instructor is then abused verbally and fired in front of his students (125–126). In another scene Perico, in the service of a legal scribe, listens to his master Chanfaina hold forth on how to write up impressive legal documents full of Latinisms and case precedent but meaning nothing. Chanfaina is then severely chastised by a good lawyer who overhears this claptrap (483–492). These scenes of teaching are doubly didactic. Not only are they full of detailed knowledge useful to the listeners (in this instance, plenty of good information on procedure, contracts, and case law) but they also teach something about teaching: teachers can be taught a harsh lesson, too. In another episode in which he tries to pass as master of a subject, Perico himself is chastised. Proud of his recently awarded but worthless bachelor’s degree, he accepts a priest’s challenge to explain comets and then bluffs with a ridiculous fantasy, only to be exposed and humiliated by the retort of the well-read priest (176–179). These are not typical didactic dialogues. They are scenes of instruction, but they brim with contentiousness. Just because ignorant or craven characters like Perico and Chanfaina have been granted a teacherly position, a place of authority—a soapbox, so to speak—this does not mean that they can not be shut down, much to the amusement of the COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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listeners. Likewise, just as members of the criollo class were given a new sense of authority by being allowed to strike out on their own, this did not automatically translate into independence from the system that granted this freedom, as we see in the example of the incarcerated Don Antonio. Most critics read the double voice in the novel—this coexistence of ridicule with sincerity and moral vision with debauchery—either as an aesthetic limitation or as an embodiment of the class struggle, what Nancy Vogeley calls ‘‘linguistic de-colonization’’ (Lizardi, 26). There is indeed in El Periquillo an honest impulse toward open competition, resistance, and inclusionary polyphony. Yet this impulse falls just short of actual change. Even though there is a limited dethronement, homeostasis—the inescapable middle station—is still the result of these unsettling debates. The energy, the potential for subversion, and the almost convincing case for disorder are all there and usefully so. But they exist only in limited quantities and through regulated venues, like the merchandise trickling in from Europe: these are scenes of discipline, after all. Indeed the entire Periquillo is rather optimistically but carefully energized by its various forms of competition: economic, generic, rhetorical, narrative, and between social castes. But this optimism belies the true effects of the decrees of libre comercio and their supposed freedom to exchange both words and goods. This is a familiar pattern in the entire history of Mexico and in fact all of Latin America: when the powers that be find themselves challenged by dissent in periods of autocracy and discursive absolutism, their typical response is censorship and ruthless repression. But a more insidious response has arisen when dissent is actually given freedom to exist, either partially or as an illusion: liberties are granted, but only up to a point, and the status quo goes under the guise of self-determination. The complicated relationship between authority figures and the restless, heckling crowds has never been clean. Sometimes the resentful crowds shout back at the master or the caudillo on his balcony, but this shouting is often tacitly sanctioned. The caudillo remains despite the ruckus. The persistence of the status quo in the face of revolt is something quite close to Lizardi. In an editorial in his Correo Semanario de México in 1826, Lizardi rails against the current government’s method of censorship. After the publication of an attack on administrative corruption, instead of shutting down presses or arresting writers, the au62


thorities began silencing the newspaper boys who ran through the city shouting the headlines. Lizardi recognizes ironically that these lurid headlines being bellowed in public could offend the ‘‘better’’ class of citizens: ‘‘para estos, el grito del muchacho es más terrible que el bramido de un tigre’’ (Obras, 6:102) [for them, the cry of the boy is more terrible than the bellow of a tiger]. But he concludes that—however uncomfortable these cries might be for a few high-placed gentlemen— there is an untouchable bottom line: voicing opinions on the street ‘‘es uno de los principales objetos de la imprenta libre’’ (Obras, 6:102) [is one of the principal objects of a free press]. The newsboy’s cry is an extension of the process of writing, printing, and publishing ideas; and this points to a rhetorical similarity between the vendor, the preacher, the educator, and the caudillo who climbs on his soapbox.13 The headlines have two intended targets: the corrupt magistrates, who might mend their ways if exposed, but also literate pedestrians with spare change, who might fall for the juicy sales pitch. The common goal is to sell—goods, ideas—and sometimes the methods used in the sale can be disputational and offensive. The right to air challenges is as inalienable as the right to sell merchandise. What is not so clear is the right to challenge the system itself. After all the shouting is finished and all the challenging is done, the process remains in place: the public gets what it wanted and expected. As I will explain in more detail, this process of regulated challenges and disputation vividly recalls a fixture of Mexican street culture: the duel of albures. This is a ritualized contest of insults where the participants pitch double-entendres at each other until the crowd, with its delighted applause, acknowledges a winner. This public contest, despite its shocking and combative nature, follows a strict and almost genteel protocol. That might explain why Lizardi, as an aspiring national educator who strove for a strong authoritarian voice, especially in his journalism, in El Periquillo offers what appears to be an inclusive ‘‘heteroglossic’’ environment of contention. Upon closer scrutiny, this disjunctive points to an essential feature of all disputational behavior and indeed of heteroglossia itself: as much as it champions change and proceeds through contention, it also contains a measure of respect for established means and implies an ultimate return to homeostasis, to a ‘‘middle station.’’ The successful outcome of any challenge presupposes common ground, a process and a fragile balance that can withstand the energy of its individual challenger. COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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For Lizardi, newly found freedom of speech does not automatically extend to calls for leveling revolutionary change. The crowds who listen do not break into rioting and revolt simply because they watch a scene of contention. The rules of the game, at least on the discursive and economic terms set forth by this novel, still constitute a mutual covenant, a kind of class détente. The failures, the losers, and the outcasts are still determined in an orderly fashion; the crowd is ultimately allowed to choose who argued—or insulted or sold—the best; but all such public events, even the scenes of chaos in El Periquillo, despite their often violent nature, never quite break down into the disarray of true revolution. Instead they produce clear individual winners and losers (with Perico being a frequent loser). Victory and its inverse, failure, are contingencies determined by and allowed for within a competitive system of (supposed) free exchange, much like the system created by the decrees of comercio libre in 1778. And, like all systems, it can be taught: this is the lesson behind the various voices tugging at Perico.

THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS As travel accounts from the period illustrate, the noise of the street in Mexico City during the early nineteenth century was deafening. Travelers like George Lyon, Joseph Burkart, and the Baron von Humboldt noted that the streets of Mexico City were filled with street people (known variously as mendigos, léperos, saragates, and guachinangos), some intoxicated with pulque, some engaged in selling trinkets or menial services, but mostly cluttering public spaces (Humboldt, awed by the number of people living in the streets and plazas, came to an almost paralyzing awareness that he could not speak for them, a dynamic almost the reverse of Lizardi’s inability to keep them out or even make them settle down—see Chapter 3). Captain George Lyon, in his Journal of a Residence and Tour in the Republic of Mexico in the Year 1826 (basically an intelligence report to British mining interests), describes the same environment in which Perico pawns his various articles of clothing, gambles, steals, and spends the night on tables: [I]nnumerable petty venders of both sexes also display their wares, crowded on tables, in boxes and baskets; in frames, or spread on the ground. These consist of cutlery, mock jewelry, gaudy clothes, dolls, toys, wax-works, glass, china, shoes, books, and in fact, an infinite variety of things; while half64


naked Léperos sleeping, overpowered by Pulque, or begging of the passersby; priests, monks, officers, Indians, ladies, and Europeans, form a continually moving motley crowd . . . The ear is frequently saluted by the loud cries of the newsmen who sell in considerable quantities the publications of the day . . . Here and there may be seen a strange wild-looking group earnestly playing at cards, or some game of chance. (2:127–128, 133)

Madame Fanny Calderón de la Barca, in her memorable record of her stay in Mexico from 1839 to 1842, jots down how a lépero accosts her through her window as she sits writing in her journal (Life, 106). In these narratives the street life seems close to undifferentiated chaos. But Madame Calderón listens and begins to distinguish the various vendors and hawkers plying the streets, each with their distinctive calls: food vendors, day laborers, mule drivers, prostitutes, newspaper boys, and so on, each selling competing goods. She found these sounds of the ‘‘street cries . . . performed by hundreds of discordant voices, impossible to understand [at] first.’’ But with a growing anthropological inquisitiveness, she began to differentiate the stylized languages she heard, like the ‘‘despondent cry of the carbonero, the coal-man’’ (‘‘ ‘Carbón, señor,’ which, as he pronounces it, sounds like ‘Carbosiú!’ ’’), the songs of the ‘‘grease-man’’ (‘‘Mantequilla! Lard! Lard! At one real and a half’’), the dried beef salesman, and many others (Life, 109). Impressed by the musicality of some of these cries, she even transcribed them into musical notation. The Mexican middle class was deeply anxious about these street people, a fact quite visible in the journalism of the period. In the years before the freedom of the press afforded by the anti-Napoleonic Cortes de Cádiz of 1812, the issue was addressed in politically neutral terms. An editorial mainstay in the semiofficial Diario de México was to suggest altruistic solutions, from charity hospices to tax-funded craft academies, without ever blaming the government or the class hierarchy for the problem.14 After the freedom of the press, however, titles like ‘‘Sobre la deplorable mendicidad en México’’ [On Deplorable Vagrancy in Mexico] or ‘‘Para extirpar la mendicidad’’ [To Eliminate Vagrancy] (El Pensador Mexicano, 21 and 28 October 1813) rang out. Captain Lyon in his Journal describes the large ‘‘mercantile Stores,’’ which are ‘‘well supplied, and numerous.’’ These are the great almacenes of the establishment, carrying expensive manufactured and imported goods and formerly run exclusively by the Spanish montañeses. But Captain Lyon notes a particularity about these stores: they have COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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open doors to the lowly portales (the stalls in the archways), where ‘‘petty venders of both sexes display their wares.’’ The spaces of commerce run into each other—one selling expensive imported manufactured goods like wine, cloth, and preserves to well-heeled patrons, while the other is populated with léperos selling ‘‘mock jewelry, gaudy clothes, dolls, toys, wax-works’’ to anyone on the street.We see in these travelers’ reports from Mexico a reality about the commercial activity of the period: there is a coexistence of sorts, a mirror image of trade on both sides of the threshold. We witness the criollo middle class living and trading in nearly the same space as a furious exchange of trinkets going on in the streets. In a late essay on real places that serve utopian functions, Foucault writes that several institutions (including cemeteries, boats, colonies, and brothels) represent a ‘‘place without a place that exists by itself,’’ displaying a parallel and liminal quality. Yet these places are nonetheless real: they are still found within society and its normal operations, functioning ‘‘in relation to the space that remains’’ (‘‘Of Other Spaces,’’ 27). The streets of Mexico, circa 1800, are such a ‘‘place without a place,’’ and the mendigos, léperos, and zaragates are its ‘‘placeless’’ denizens.15 According to the Covarrubias dictionary, a vago (street person) is by definition someone who has neither ‘‘lugar ni espacio’’ (no fixed place), and mendigos (beggars) are those who, like the mendicant religious orders, have no business. Vagrancy, then, is when people have no business being where they are. But the accounts of buzzing commercial activity in Mexico speak differently: there is an almost deafening amount of business going on, and the mendigos are there en masse, to the point where the streets are defined by their presence. The contrast between the léperos and the merchants in the large almacenes makes the léperos appear invisible to those inside. It is not that the léperos have no business, no goods to sell. Rather, the scale of what is bought and sold (local handcrafts, small amounts of food, and gewgaws of little value) and the almost incomprehensible rate of their transactions make it look as if they have no business, at least to the cultured folk looking through the doors of the large stores and the windows of genteel parlors. The images from the two sides of the open door are more similar, if vastly different in degree, than anyone acknowledges. The large mercantile stores have expensive, imported ‘‘cultured’’ goods that move slowly, just as the recent shakeup in their trade was slow and ponderous. The local trinkets and the words of the street, in contrast, move briskly. The lack of an appropriate place or activities ap66


propriate to that place is entirely in the eye of the beholder; to those inside the houses and the almacenes, like Madame Calderón and the readers of the Diario de México concerned with the noise outside, it sounds like ‘‘discordant voices, impossible to understand.’’ The same rules of commerce—in fact rules in general—do not appear to apply to this confusion of infinite variety. It all sounds like a vaguely threatening chaos until the ear begins to attune to the patterns, and something familiar emerges: the give and take of trade, with its shadow restrictions, resembling the slow ultramarine commerce (if at much smaller scale and at a wildly animated pace). Despite an ardent wish for individual freedoms and for a loosening of barriers and distinctions (where voices and individuals can cross the thresholds into places not properly theirs) in El Periquillo and in Lizardi’s work in general, there is also a wariness of cataclysmic models of change, of crossing over beyond the possibility of return. Never quite reaching the extremes of the violent, Jacobinite Independentists, El Periquillo displays a faith in organic progress, in the use of standing structures that can be reconditioned to allow contained change but remain, in the larger sense, intact. The renovated balance required by comercio libre is thus echoed in El Periquillo’s vision of free-market education as well as in its rhetorical methods: certain sector losses are acceptable—previously favored groups like the montañeses might lose their stranglehold on commerce, but others took their place; who the trading partners are is less important than the trade itself and maintaining the trans-Atlantic routes of commerce. Once again, the system adapts and remains. Don Antonio is indeed freed from jail and returned to his native wife, and his name is cleared; but his vindication only goes so far: his stock-in-trade still came to him by the good graces of the marquis. Likewise, although Perico flirts with the various callings and activities that vie for his being, he is never quite free to make his choices distinct from the voices competing for him. At times he heeds the call of his gambling friends, apparently with conviction and finality, just as at times he heeds the voices of the moralists. But in the end, even despite his most dissolute moments, he is bound to crawl his way back to the median way, to the middle station. Even the street vices into which Perico falls—gambling in particular—reflect this homeostatic model of progress and exchange. In a sermonizing moment close to the end of his career as a cardsharp, Perico muses on the nature of gambling: COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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Habréis oído decir que muchos se sostienen del juego . . . ¿Se debe reputar el juego como ramo de comercio y como arbitrio honesto para subsistir de él? . . . Si los hombres no pervirtieran el orden de las cosas, el juego, lejos de ser prohibido por malo, fuera tan lícito que entrara a la parte de aquella virtud moral que se llama eutropelia; pero como su codicia traspasa los límites de la diversión y en estos juegos de que hablamos se arruinan unos a otros sin la más mínima consideración ni fraternidad, ha sido necesario que los gobiernos ilustrados metan la mano procurando contener este abuso tan pernicioso. (365–367) [You will have heard it said that many support themselves through gambling . . . Is it right to characterize gambling as a branch of commerce and as an honest pursuit which can provide a living? . . . If men did not pervert the order of things, gambling, far from being outlawed for being wrong, would be so licit that it would fall under that moral virtue called eutrapely. But since greed overcomes the limits of entertainment and since people ruin one another without the slightest consideration or sense of fellowship with these games of which we speak, it is necessary for enlightened governments to impose themselves essaying to contain this pernicious abuse.]

If people were not subject to the extremes of human nature, Perico believes, gambling would actually be a virtue like ‘‘eutropelia.’’ Eutrapely, ‘‘pleasantness in conversation’’ or ‘‘ready-wit,’’ is one of Aristotle’s seven moral virtues from the Nicomachean Ethics (1128a). It is the virtue of ‘‘smooth-talk’’ and, like the other moral virtues, is one of moderation, of the ‘‘mean between two vices.’’ In extremis, it can be sinful, as referred to by St. Paul when he condemns eutrapely as ‘‘coarseness, salacious talk and jokes—all this is wrong’’ (Ephesians 5.4), but in moderation can lead to wit. Balance, Aristotle stresses, is the key to all virtues. Likewise, the way Perico learns to cheat at gambling is by moderating its extremes. He learns from Januario how to manage its aleatory element, how to minimize chance. Januario’s method is to turn the uncertainty of gambling into a winnable game. Like the contest of wits in Gil Blas, when the student traveler beats out his friend because he has a trick up his sleeve, virtue seems to be a function of having the upper hand, of steadying the unsteady. As Perico muses, gambling is related to an ideal version of free commerce, since both rely on infinite possibility. But here the trick, liter-

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ally, is to control that indeterminacy, to limit the possible outcomes to known ones. One of Januario’s main strategies for cheating at cards is to disrupt, to ‘‘talk trash’’ and feign anger in order to create a distraction and make off with the pot: ‘‘A cada rato lo veía yo con dinero, y ya suyo, y ya ajeno, él no dejaba de manejar monedas; ello, a cada instante, también tenía disputas, reconvenciones y reclamos; más él sabía sacudirse con la bola en la mano’’ (351) [Each moment I saw him with money, now his, now someone else’s, he never stopped handling coins; this, at each instant, also led to disputes, claims and counterclaims; but he knew how to make off with the pot in hand]. Transforming the contest over money into a contest over language ‘‘claims and counterclaims,’’ it reveals a similarity between both methods of exchange: in the spaces of disputation and competition, where there is true comercio libre, in theory the most skilled, the best argument, the best pitch, or the best hand would win. But in reality the method is rigged. Perico’s education is an apprenticeship in the arts of cheating. Like the calculated switch from montañeses to criollos, the winnings indeed went to someone else’s hands, but the method of profit itself remained; the house still wins. El Periquillo adds to this complex portrait of the supposedly openended exchanges, both commercial and verbal, by contrasting it with what society would be like without them. The island of Saucheofú, where Perico is shipwrecked after his exile in the Philippines, is the utopian reverse of New Spain. In this island, the vices and abuses of Perico’s homeland are inconceivable. Everyone has a trade, and money is in abundant supply. The power of the corruptible ‘‘learned’’ professions is severely limited simply because the need for them does not exist. For instance, lawyers are redundant since the laws are available to everyone: Arrebató mi curiosidad un hombre que en un papel estaba copiando muy despacio unos caracteres que estaban grabados en una piedra de mármol que se veía fijada en la esquina de la calle. Pregunté a mi amigo que significaba aquello, y me respondió que aquél estaba copiando una ley patria que sin duda le interesaría.—¿Pues qué, le dije, las leyes patrias están escritas en las esquinas de las calles de tu tierra?—Sí, me dijo, en la ciudad están todas las leyes fijadas para que se instruyan en ellas los ciudadanos. Por eso mi hermano se admiró tanto cuando le hablaste de los abogados de tu tierra. (771)


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[My curiosity was piqued by a man who was copying very slowly onto paper some characters engraved on a marble stone that was posted on a street corner. I asked my friend what that meant, and he answered that the man was surely writing down a law that interested him. ‘‘What then,’’ I asked him, ‘‘are the laws written on the street corners in your land?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ he answered. ‘‘All the laws are posted in the city so that all citizens may instruct themselves. This is why my brother was so astonished when you spoke about the lawyers in your land.’’]

The contentious disputations that in New Spain would resolve themselves through challenges (‘‘disputes, claims and counterclaims’’) in Saucheofú are quietly solidified into stone. Just as there is no need for lawyers—who are after all professional contenders meant to balance things out—there is no need for skillful eutrapely, for the balancing act of good rhetoric. When Aristotle distinguishes between moral virtues and the intellectual ones, the difference is that the intellectual virtues are the ‘‘solitary’’ virtues of reason and judgment while the moral virtues—like eutrapely—are subject to the messiness of collective behavior. Saucheofú is a place of such intellectual virtues; the median way is a given, because all social extremes are regulated. For instance, the inequalities between manual labor and commercial pursuit and between high and low birth have all been eliminated: everyone has a trade or knows a manual art, so everyone has useful and equally valuable wares to sell. And the equal value means that the need for specialized intermediaries (vendors) is also gone. This is why the many elements of Perico’s patently imperfect home culture do not exist there. Perico’s real world of New Spain, of negotiated contests between the paternal authority figures like Don Antonio and the Colonel and the defenders of vice like Januario and Aguilucho, is the opposite of this dreamy locale. The virtuous dronings of Limahotón and his brother have no Januario or Martín Pelayo or Aguilucho to challenge them. Likewise, in Saucheofú everyone has a skill to produce a valuable good of some form or another, so the need for a marketplace simply does not exist. Everything is worth its face value. Nor is there a place or a need for the loud trinket sellers of the street. The newspaper boys running from the authorities and the singing street hawkers and mendicants recorded by Fanny Calderón de la Barca are as redundant as the established ‘‘mercantile houses’’ dealing in imported goods. Saucheofú is a world without competition, without haggling, and without the temp70


tations—and possibilities—associated with competition. It is a perfect closed system. Perico muses that ‘‘if men did not pervert the order of things,’’ gambling too could be a moral virtue. The element of human perversion means that variability is added to the mix. In this sense Saucheofú’s economy is an ‘‘unperverted’’ place: on both linguistic and material levels, the contests have been reduced to a minimum because everyone has the same advantages and the same tools, as on Robinson Crusoe’s solitary island, where everything belongs to the middle station already. Winning big, cheating, posturing, and dissembling are unknown in Saucheofú. Its citizens will never win big at cards or close profitable deals (but neither will they suffer from the same close calls that dog Perico throughout his life or from the revolutions that threaten his country). These islanders will never know the pleasures of beating someone in either a fair or a fixed contest or the exhilaration of circulating in streets full of hookers, hucksters, and trinket sellers. In this utopia, there is no need to decree a bogus comercio libre, no attempt to ‘‘free’’ the exchange of ideas and educations, because everyone already has everything: the ebbs and flows of the ‘‘social intercourse’’ are squelched, and intellectual virtue is the norm. There is no game to rig. Rather than being a true ideal utopia, Saucheofú seems to be a magnification of a very real system already in place.

A SIGNIFYIN’ PARROT, OR ORDER AMIDST THE SHOUTING When Januario first introduces Perico to the language of the street, the rugged dialéctica leperuna, Perico is easily shocked: ‘‘cuando platican, golpean; cuando quieren divertir, fastidian . . . antes las chanzas de éstos ofenden las honras y las personas, y sus agudezas punzan la fama o el corazón del prójimo’’ (362) [when they converse, they pummel; when they want to entertain, they annoy . . . their jests offend people and honor, and they pierce the reputation or the heart of their fellow man]. Perico, who is still bound by his genteel criollo upbringing, is not quite ready for this kind of salty joshing: En esto nos salimos de la pocilga y fuimos a tomar café. Lo restante del día, que lo pasamos en visitas y andar calles hasta las doce, me anduve yo cuzqueando y rascando. Tal era la multitud de piojos que se me pegaron de la maldita fruza. Y no fue esto lo peor, sino que tuve que sufrir algunas chanzonetas pesadas que me dijeron los amigos; porque los animalitos me andaban COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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por encima y eran tan gordos y tan blancos que se veían de legua; y cada vez que alguno se ponía donde lo vieran, decía uno: —Eso no, mi amigo Perico no, que aquí estoy yo. Otros decían: —Hombre, eso tiene buscar novias de a medio. Otros: —¡Qué buenas fuerzas tienes pues cargas un animal tan grande! (356) [Meanwhile, we left that pit and went to have some coffee. The rest of the day, which we spent visiting and wandering the streets until twelve, I was itching and scratching. Such was the multitude of nits that had attached themselves to me from the damn blanket. This wasn’t the worst thing; I also had to suffer some heavy-handed jesting by friends, because the little animals were on top of me and were so fat and white they could be seen a league away, and every time one came into sight, someone said: ‘‘Not that, my friend Perico, not that! Here I am!’’ Others said: ‘‘Man, that’s what happens when you halfway look for girlfriends!’’ Others: ‘‘My you’re strong, to be carrying such a beast around!’’]

The aggressive, sexual overtone to this heavy-handed kidding appears to be meant to pick a fight; but at that stage in his education in the dialéctica leperuna the tender, young Perico does not yet know how to fight back and is stunned into silence. These léperos are baiting Perico into a contest of albures or albureo, as the practice is known. Albureo, as Octavio Paz defines it, ‘‘es el combate verbal hecho de alusiones obscenas y de doble sentido que tanto se practica en la ciudad de México’’ (35) [is a verbal combat, composed of obscene allusions and double-meanings, as practiced in Mexico City]. This taunting mainstay of urban Mexican street life is at once competitive and playful, aggressive and fun. Given the obscene nature of this practice, historical records of it are rare, but albureo has clearly been present for a very long time.16 In the same section where she records the cries of the street vendors, Fanny Calderón de la Barca notes such an event, although its meaning truly escapes her: ‘‘Then passes by the cambista, a sort of Indian she-trader or exchanger, who sings out, ‘tejocotes por venas de chile!,’ a small fruit which she proposes exchanging for hot peppers. No harm in that’’ (Life, 109–110). The well-bred Madame Calderón, puzzled why anyone would want to exchange whole fruits for mere chile seeds, is missing the unmistakable challenge to a duel of albures. (The reference to the chile, albureo’s standard euphemism for the penis, and to tejocotes, another 72


word common in albures because of its easy metathetic transposition [switching the j and the c dramatically changes the meaning], reveals a phrase of startling crudeness: ‘‘te cojo te(s) por ven, haz—de chile’’ [I’ll fuck you so come, make like a dick].) No harm in that, indeed. Although it shares some underworld associations with thieves’ cant (like Argentinean lunfardo), albureo is not a secret guild code. In its natural environment it is a public entertainment where all those listening are in on the game (except poor Madame Calderón, ensconced in her parlor). It is much closer to the Afro-American practice of ‘‘playing the dozens’’ or ‘‘Signifyin(g),’’ as Henry Louis Gates refers to it. This is because both in playing the dozens and in albureo skill is measured by how cleverly the true meaning is hidden. The result—what Gates calls the ‘‘the sheer play of the signifier’’ (Signifying Monkey, 59)—appears to be a deceitfully simple conversation, of ‘‘absoluta naturalidad’’ as Jiménez notes, but with an unrelenting thread of obscenity (Picardía, 77).17 To the credit of the contestants and to the amusement of the listeners, the ‘‘clean’’ surface language can be a coherent and even witty dialogue that hides its true sense—like the gamblers’ mockery of Perico’s head lice—or it can simply be a playful set of associated statements that can puzzle the audience—like the street-seller’s incongruent offer recorded innocently by Madame Calderón or a hilarious exchange between a pelado and a street hussy recorded by Jiménez and spoken entirely in automobile brand names (Nueva Picardía, ‘‘Homenaje a Posada,’’ section ‘‘la flor,’’ no pagination). But most importantly, and in distinction to ‘‘Signifyin(g),’’ albureo typically occurs in places of commerce: pulquerías, the portales (outdoor stalls), the street; its singsong is close to that of the street hawker. When Perico enters the gambling life in earnest, the obscene albureo subtext even seeps into his private thoughts, as when he watches a game of albures (which at the time referred to a card game), and a proverb with a nasty double meaning comes into his head:18 ‘‘[yo] creyendo que en dos albures que acertaran se perdía todo nuestro trabajo, y nos salíamos sin blanca soñando que habíamos tenido, lo que a mí se me hacía intolerable, según el axioma de los tahures, de que más se siente lo que se cría que lo que se pare’’ (359) [I was thinking that if two albures hit the mark all our hard work would go to waste, and we would leave empty-handed, simply dreaming about what we had had—this seemed intolerable and, according to that axiom of cardsharps, ‘‘one feels more for a child reared than a child birthed’’]. The salty axiom has an untranslatable triple meaning: ‘‘sentir lo que se pare’’ can refer to childbirth, COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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gambling, or erections. In any case, the homology between the names of the card game and the game of insults points to a shared original habitat: a duel of albures typically breaks out in the public fora of commerce and exchange: in pulquerías over pick-up games of cards, in the vendor’s stalls (portales), in the taunting invitations of ambulant sellers and snake-oil peddlers, and as barroom chatter. This ritualized exchange, like the voices of the street vendors, is a public event par excellence. Both are on some level about spectacle, for often the victory is measured by its sheer entertainment value: how well the crowd is ‘‘sold’’ by a contestant’s jabs. It is a truly interactive activity, like ‘‘chatter’’ at a sports event meant to make players fumble by ridiculing them and making them self-conscious in the eyes of the crowd (as Januario teaches Perico to do to opponents in card games). Albureo is so performative that it easily transfers to the theater—in the early twentieth century, traveling vaudeville acts hired talented albureros from pulquerías and street corners, put them in clown-face, and simply cut them loose in circus tents (Mejía Prieto, Albures, 29). The public and interactive nature of albureo is made clear by how poorly it lends itself to transcription once it is separated from its nonverbal and spectacular dimensions.19 Yet even within the rude discourse of albureo there is a certain clarity to the expectations if not to the outcome. As in any public show, the setting—the divisions between spectators and spectacle—implies a mutual covenant, and the range of outcomes (if not the actual one) is clear. There is a lot of shouting going on, but it is all recognizable and has its place. That the outcome will ensue is not in doubt. In this sense El Periquillo Sarniento itself is structured like a duel of albures: both are akin to Aristotelian virtues like eutrapely as well as to commerce and gambling, where the negotiation needs to maintain the mean between extremes. This economy of voices challenging each other recalls Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, albeit one of its little-noticed implications. Readers of Bakhtin tend to emphasize the subversive aspects of heteroglossia— the topsy-turvy, upside-down world of carnival. This emphasis often overshadows the fact that dialogism is systemic. Discussing the dialogic origins of the novel, Bakhtin maintains that the novel developed into an entirely new ‘‘hybrid construction’’ (Dialogic Imagination, 313), consisting of a set of binary oppositions, ‘‘one point of view opposed to another, one evaluation opposed to another, one accent opposed to another . . . This interaction, this dialogic tension between two lan74


guages and two belief systems,’’ becomes a normalized tug-of-war, an ‘‘organizing heteroglossia’’ (315; my emphasis). As we saw from the scene of ritual-role reversal in Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera explored in the previous chapter, the ritual challenges of dialogism in essence preserve a status quo of bourgeois virtue (as Franco argues). This virtue is not monolithic or rigid, however; rather it is one of certain flexible marketplace values, an economy of words and competitive exchanges—dialogues, debates—that can exist to some degree freely but within bounds.Victory over an opponent does not mean victory over the system. After a duel of albures, a vicious battle to gain the soul of a convert, or a contest between newsboys to sell a print run of slanderous broadsheets, the system remains, no matter who wins or loses. When the anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied gift-giving, he observed that despite the illusion that this activity is selfless and altruistic, it is in fact supported by an invisible system of reciprocity.20 Likewise, in dialogic exchanges—despite the impression that carnivalesque dialogism is subversive—both the winners and losers simply by participating in the conventions uphold a system of free exchange, of ‘‘organizing heteroglossia’’: an economic system of comercio libre, newly liberated but nonetheless still subject to certain regulations and principles. Octavio Paz’s typically dark analysis of the Mexican condition focuses on what happens when the delicate balances and established rituals are ruptured—for instance, on the literal violence that can erupt when somebody breaks the rules of albureo. Paz’s observations center on the rare fatal outcome when a cornered contestant breaks the playful figurality: ‘‘chinga tu madre’’ [fuck your mother], an unambiguous and deadly insult that cuts to the quick of a Mexican’s sense of himself and often ends in bloodshed (Laberinto, 35).21 In its everyday practice, however, albureo is not inherently violent. Instead of being close to a knife-fight, it is closer to the habitual routine of the open-air market, to the fast and furious ebb-and-flow of street trade and its underworld correlate, gambling: while there are clear winners and losers, the loser is not annihilated but instead simply chastened and perhaps left broke. As Paz himself notes, the normal fate of the loser in a duel of albures is silence: the winner has the last word, and the loser—like the shocked Perico—is left speechless.22 It is not surprising that this process proves puzzling to anyone who is not ‘‘in’’ on the game, like Madame Calderón (baffled by her chile-seller) or like Perico (confused by the teacherly duels clashing around him)—worse COMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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yet, those so unlucky as to be caught in the fray without really knowing what is going on will be pummeled, like Perico left speechless after the taunts about his head-lice. But the violence threatened by albures is not literal. It is formal. This figural violence becomes literal only when something goes terribly wrong and because of this the stakes suddenly and precipitously rise from simple contest to fight to the death. In everyday expression, the stakes are low and the speed and the volume high, like the commerce of ‘‘gaudy clothes, dolls, toys, wax-works, glass,’’ flurrying in the street. The combat of albures is not bloody but rather playful and entertaining, profitable for some and very, very measured, almost to the point of gentility. If the sermon, the didactic dialogue, and the salespitch are the virtuous smooth-talk of middle-class priests, teachers, and merchants, then the albur is their obscene alter ego. Carlos Monsiváis speculates that despite the fact that its natural environment lies in the humble pulquerías and street corners, the origins of albureo do not lie at the bottom of the social ladder, with the vast majority of Indians and dirt-poor laborers, many of who still spoke indigenous languages. Rather, Monsiváis believes that its roots lie with the middle class, ‘‘una sociedad absolutamente fastidiada por la sobreabundancia de moralejas y sermones’’ (‘‘La vida,’’ 58) [a society absolutely fed up by the overabundance of lessons and sermons], who misused their patchwork learning to create this vulgar game as a grotesque form of witty repartee: ‘‘la elaboración de estos retruécanos más bien me remite al ocio fecundo de curas lascivos, de abogados hartos de leer el Código de procedimientos, de literatos fallidos, de médicos de provincia que quieren aprovechar en algo sus gustos literarios, de periodistas habituados al intercambio relampagueante de cantina’’ (‘‘La vida,’’ 58) [the production of these puns instead points to the fruitful leisure of lascivious priests, lawyers tired of reading the Procedural Code, failed littérateurs, provincial doctors who want to put to some use their literary tastes, newspapermen used to rapid-fire barroom exchanges]. The village priest, the second-rate doctor, the law clerk, the hack, the lay-about (Perico was, at one point or another, all of these): these are the lower-grade letrados with just enough leisure time and education to sit around and hurl entertaining abuse at each other. Although the rightful place of albureo is with the shrill cries of the street vendor, it shares a family resemblance with the didactic dialogues frequently found in the catechisms, grammars, and newspapers of the bourgeoi76


sie; it is, like Perico himself, a déclassé product of a middle class that, when no longer welcome by priests and lawyers, is taken up by the street sellers, the gamblers, the town drunks. It is another example of the ‘‘open doors’’ between the great almacenes of the establishment carrying imported goods and the humble stalls. But despite their similarities, this hidden common ground is still divided by the door itself. The rich have their place, the others too; each system exists in its own space. Those who venture from one to the other are merely slumming. Despite the years Perico spent in the streets he will finally cross the threshold back and return home. The vision of exchange mapped by the novel is one where failure functions as just another necessary contingency within this system of exchange. The possibility of failure is what makes competition both possible and compelling to the target audience/potential buyer: we watch a contest, intending to fall only for the best salesman, the wittiest alburero, the most fiery preacher, and the rest will lose out. This compulsion extends to the narrative pull of the novel. The reason we continue to turn the pages after hearing the long and boring sermons from the likes of the Colonel or the dying Perico is simply to hear the more entertaining comebacks: episodes of the young Perico ignoring these sermons or Januario’s humorous defenses of vice; in other words, to see exactly how the homilies are not to be followed. Perico keeps repeating that the intention of showing these counterexamples is to offer a cautionary tale. The general lesson is that crooked scribes, compulsive cheaters, and incompetent physicians will always get their comic due if they ignore the explicit advice. But these stern warnings are like the ‘‘surface’’ meaning of ‘‘absoluta naturalidad’’ hiding the obscene underside of albures. This misbehavior remains more entertaining and fun to watch, just as the dirty version of albures makes the ‘‘clean’’ surface compelling. Watching the contest between the moralists and the dissolutes, between the clean and the obscene, makes for a good show. ‘‘No harm in that,’’ as the oblivious Madame Calderón states. This vibrant yet compromised balance of competing voices in El Periquillo Sarniento extends to the high and the low, without necessarily privileging one as ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘wrong.’’ As a result, however, the novel is bound by an equilibrium maintaining that division. It offers a model for a moral détente, in which the afflatus of the ‘‘virtuous’’ well-born can coexist with the low intentions of the léperos on the shared, and stable, common ground of contention. However much El Periquillo Sarniento is set and operates under the sign of the revoluCOMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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tion that began with the reforms of comercio libre and however much it embraces a certain kind of aggressive challenge that could have led to re-envisioning the way things are done (in commerce, in education, in social mobility), it ultimately stops short of true systemic change. Like Robinson Crusoe, Perico finally undergoes a religious conversion that returns him to his predestined ‘‘middle station’’ of bourgeois virtue. He does this in the peaceful and significantly named town of San Agustín de las Cuevas, far from the capital, whose multiplicity of urban voices and vices has clearly proved too great a temptation for him. Settled as a respectable merchant in the heart of agrarian production, this newly minted honnête homme removes himself from the messy contentiousness that had pulled him in too many directions, to a peaceful locale closer in spirit to Saucheofú than to the pulquerías and the portales. In his last days, Perico lectures his children about a new source for concern: Por algunos años más . . . viví en San Agustín de las Cuevas, hasta que me vi precisado realizar mis intereses y radicarme en esta ciudad, ya por ver si en ella restablecía mi salud . . . y ya por poner aquellos a cubierto de las resultas de la insurrección que se suscitó en este Reino en el año de 1810. ¡Epoca verdaderamente fatal y desastrosa para la Nueva España! ¡Epoca de horror, de crimen, sangre y desolación! ¡Cuántas reflexiones pudiera haceros sobre el origen, progresos y probables fines de esta guerra! Muy fácil me sería haceros una reseña de la historia de la América, y dejaros el campo abierto para que reflexionarais de parte de quién de los contendientes está la razón, si de la del gobierno español o de los americanos que pretenden hacerse independientes de España; pero es muy peligroso escribir esto en México el año de 1813. No quiero comprometer vuestra seguridad instruyéndoos en materias políticas que no estáis en estado de comprender. (917) [For several years more . . . I lived in San Agustín of the Caves, until I saw it necessary to realize my profit and move to this city, to see if I could reestablish my health in it . . . and to try to safeguard that same profit from the insurrection that began in this Kingdom in the year 1810. What a fateful and disastrous time for New Spain! What a time of horror, crime, blood, and desolation! How many reflections I could offer you on the origin, progress, and probable ends of this war! It would be easy for me to sketch for you the history of America and then leave the field open for you to reflect upon which of 78


the contenders is within reason, whether the Spanish government or those Americans who aspire to make themselves independent of Spain; but it is quite dangerous to write this in Mexico in the year 1813. I do not want to compromise your safety by instructing you in political matters which you cannot understand.]

On the horizon is another challenge to a face-off, one more aggressive contention between formidable forces—the Spanish government and those Americans who aspire to independence. Perico, now a sensible father, strongly advises his children not to enter this fray, because the stakes of the whole enterprise are simply too high. The novel is premised upon the notion that the ability to dispute is key to education. But this ability to challenge requires a system—perhaps an open-ended one, but a system nonetheless. This system is by no means narrow or prudish—shady dealings, bad behavior, laziness, sex, theft, beggary, gambling, consorting with the lower classes, and abuses of all sorts each have their place and are tacitly acknowledged: Bakhtin’s upsidedown world of ‘‘organizing heteroglossia.’’ There are limits. A challenge to the political sense of stability itself, against the organizing aspect of the heteroglossia that allows for this multiplicity, would of course be too much. When the ‘‘soft revolution’’ of the decree of comercio libre threatens to become hard and bloody, Perico stops parroting and tries to staunch the chatter by not speaking at all (‘‘I do not want to compromise your safety by instructing you in political matters which you cannot understand’’). This version of revolution is bound to fail, because within it exists a contradictory wish for homeostasis, for things to remain as they already are. The novel gravitates toward a mercantilist ‘‘golden mean,’’ but this golden mean also implies certain contingencies—gambles—made in order for the overarching system to remain in place during periods of change, when that system is being challenged. Power and the powerful are not monolithic things that go uncontested; the system itself must adapt in order to remain. It must accept certain challenges to a face-off. Thus the ending of the novel can be read both as a hesitation to commit to revolution and as one last but equally failed attempt at education, as an attempt that in turn reveals the very nature of education. Perhaps the reformed Perico claiming that he finally learned his lesson ultimately fails to learn the biggest one: when the newly sanctioned criollo classes—the children of Perico—are presented with the opporCOMPROMISED FREE MARKETS IN EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO

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tunity to define themselves as an independent voice on a world stage, the old parrot himself sets an odd example by choosing silence. He has refused to take the final challenge. His last failure, then, is as predictable as it is heartbreaking. He is simply continuing his lifelong habit of not learning the lesson and furthermore cannot resist the pull of his rightful place. His inability to challenge the system of controlled challenges itself, to emulate the example of the competition that swirled freely around him and to project it to grander scale—to see the ‘‘big picture’’—finally isolates Perico in his own private, utopian Saucheofú. He becomes a Robinson Crusoe who backs off from one final duel of albures and retreats to the silence of his island; like the ironic, ‘‘wise’’ teacher at the end of Rousseau’s Emile, he retires to the comfort of his idyllic garden, away from the toils and challenges of the rude world beyond its walls.

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CHAPTER 3

Alexander von Humboldt’s Work on Mexico, Cultural Allegory, and the Limits of Vision

Nos une también la comunidad, mucho más profunda, de la emoción cotidiana ante el mismo objeto natural. El choque de la sensibilidad con el mismo mundo labra, engendra un alma común . . . El poeta ve, al reverberar de la luna en la nieve de los volcanes. —ALFONSO REYES (VISIÓN DE ANÁHUAC, 64)

[We are also linked by the far deeper community of the daily emotions aroused by the same natural objects. The impact of the same world upon the sensibility engenders a common soul . . . The poet sees, as the moonlight shimmers on the snow of the volcanoes.] (29–30) Man looks aloft, and with uplifted eyes Beholds his own hereditary skies. —OVID, METAMORPHOSES 1 : 85 (DRYDEN TRANSLATION)

Why Humboldt? Jokingly dismissing contemporary Freudian literary criticism, Harold Bloom compares it to the Holy Roman Empire: ‘‘not holy, not Roman, nor an Empire; not Freudian, or literary, or criticism’’ (Poetics, 228). One might offer the same litany about Humboldt’s place in this study of the failures of Mexican cultural figures. After all, Humboldt is not Mexican, is known more as a natural scientist than as a cultural figure (although he was both), and is most certainly not a failure. The more serious question is: why include a foreign vision when considering the Mexican imaginary? If we widen the scope of this project to include such ‘‘external’’ visions, we might have to account for all the other famous and influential travelers to Mexico, figures ranging from Thomas Gage in the seventeenth century to Antonin Artaud, Aaron Copland, D. H. Lawrence, Tina Modotti, and Malcolm Lowry in the twentieth. Each went to Mexico, engaged with the culture, contributed in some way to the construction of Mexican cultural identity, and, by extension, helped shape that national imaginary.

In response to all of this I suggest that the case of Humboldt—the German scientist, philosopher of science, travel writer—is exceptional if not unique. Humboldt is not only indelibly linked to the formation of independent Latin America but most importantly is also perceived to be so by Latin America itself. Soon after Humboldt published the Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne [Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain] (1811), a work widely disseminated in both Spain and Spanish America by a proud Bourbon government, the wars of secession began—in part because of Humboldt’s writings.1 As an Enlightenment liberal, Humboldt was discreetly anticolonial in the sense that he advocated self-rule and the Universal Rights of Man. This was apparently missed by the Spanish authorities, who—impressed by his scientific rigor—did not understand that his data pointed an accusing finger at them. It is also a matter of historical record that Humboldt maintained personal friendships with key political figures like Simón Bolívar in South America and Lucas Alamán in Mexico. These founding fathers were both inspired and encouraged by the German savant’s interest in their world and their plight. Bolívar, motivated by Humboldt’s famous 1802 ascent of Mount Chimborazo, in 1821 traveled to Ecuador to recreate Humboldt’s feat, as Mary Louise Pratt has brought to light. In his own account, Bolívar-on-the-Mount writes a Petrarchan story of conversion: intoxicated by the landscape, he finds himself recalling in awe that Humboldt’s scientific mission was to provide a voice for that landscape. Bolívar declares this parallel to his own political mission to provide a voice for the people (Simón Bolívar, 2:106–107). The Mexican historian Enrique Krauze sums up a long-held view: ‘‘Humboldt fue un partero de la conciencia Mexicana . . . En esencia, dio a México su carta de naturalización en la historia occidental’’ [Humboldt was a midwife of Mexican consciousness . . . Essentially, he gave Mexico its naturalization papers into Western history] (‘‘Humboldt,’’ 22). According to this view, before Independence Mexico and indeed all of Latin America had been excluded from history; freedom from Spain brought with it Enlightenment and an entrance to the community of nations. Humboldt was an agent of both. In short, Humboldt allowed Mexico into modernity. Whatever the accuracy of this view might be, Humboldt (or at least his memory) in Latin America has become intertwined with the beginning of the nation. He has become a mythic figure buried deep within the collective psyche, a godfather to the foundation and someone who 82


was there at the dawn of modern history and quite possibly a cause of it. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, when the ancient Gypsy necromancer Melquíades is dying, he regresses and begins muttering in forgotten tongues; ‘‘lo único que [se] pudo aislar en las parrafadas pedregosas, fue el insistente martilleo de la palabra equinoccio equinoccio equinoccio, y el nombre de Alexander von Humboldt’’ (125– 126) [the only thing that could be isolated in the rocky paragraphs was the insistent hammering on the word equinox, equinox, equinox and the name of Alexander von Humboldt] (74). The sense is that Humboldt was there when memory began, and he continues to function as a reference point in an imaginary timeline: he has become the guiding spirit of a Latin American version of Romantic Sehnsucht, the longing for the distant morning when time was new and humanity and nature were still one. His monumental stature will lead us to a consideration of the uses of monumentality itself. It bears noting that Humboldt himself was deeply attracted to the monuments, and the ruins, of the New World, as attested in his Vues des cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810; untranslated).2 So while it is true that Humboldt may not be part of Latin American or Mexican literature in the narrowest sense, he is very much part of the Mexican canon in another, even monumental, sense. The heart of Mexican culture, the search for ‘‘mexicanidad’’ (and indeed the greater Latin American search for a sense of identity), is undergirded by Humboldt’s initial quest. Nineteenth-century thinkers and shapers of the Mexican nation, figures as diverse as the Jesuit Fray Servando Teresa de Mier; the conservative Lucas Alamán; the liberal José María Luis Mora; and the official intellectuals of the Porfirio Díaz regime (the positivist ‘‘científicos’’) like Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Justo Sierra, and Gabino Barreda were always somehow in dialogue with Humboldt.3 So although we can talk at length about a late German Enlightenment Humboldt or a Pan-European Romantic Humboldt, we can also talk about a Latin American (and Mexican) Humboldt. Independent Latin America, for better or for worse, in important ways first saw itself through Humboldt’s eyes.4 Humboldt is important not just because of the influence he may or may not have exerted over Independence but rather because of his effect on what followed, because of his constant presence during the tumultuous nineteenth century and beyond. His particular impressions of Mexico—his vues—ingrained themselves into Mexico’s eventual vision of itself. Aptly enough, for a late Enlightenment thinker like Humboldt the ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT’S WORK ON MEXICO

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theme of vision itself was central. That is clear in the debates over the possibility of objectivity on the part of the investigator in search of the truth—this was pondered not only by natural scientists but also by artists, historians, and philosophers, as Lorraine Daston has amply studied. Beginning roughly in 1620 with Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, a series of advances like the invention of the microscope, the development of the Linnaean classificatory system, and the institutionalization of the scientific method had reshaped theories of empirical knowledge. By the time the young Humboldt came into the fray, the vibrant German intellectual scene was dominated by figures like Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Gottfried von Herder, and the reigning theory was Naturphilosophie. As Margarita Bowen explains, this line of thought followed Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in questioning the ‘‘mechanistic and materialist science of the French and stressed the need to comprehend the unity and harmony of nature’’ beyond individual phenomena (Empiricism, 216). In other words, Naturphilosophie concerned itself with the possibility of scientific objectivity, concluding that, in Goethe’s terms, the object of study ‘‘opens up a new organ of perception in us’’ (Scientific Studies, 39). To the writers and scientists of Humboldt’s milieu, the study of nature had become a deliberately indirect way of learning about oneself. They believed that when one studied volcanoes or light refraction or plant ecology as deeply and methodically as possible, one was really learning about how one sees and about the process of cognition in general. Humboldt internalized and modified many of these ideas about the limits—and true agendas—of scientific objectivity. Yet Goethe’s and Naturphilosophie’s self-reflexive notions about scientific knowledge become complicated when a researcher like Humboldt expands the object of study to include another culture and another subjectivity, as Humboldt does in his own work on the Americas, as in the Essai politique and in Vues des cordillères et monumens. In Ansichten der Natur [Aspects of Nature] (1849), his collected lectures comparing landscapes from his various journeys, Humboldt intimates that citizens build their national character through sensibility to their very specific natural surroundings, within a certain time and place: ‘‘the direction [of] . . . national character, and the more grave or gay disposition of men, are dependent in high degree on climatic differences . . . How powerfully have the skies of Greece acted on its inhabi84


tants!’’ (Aspects of Nature, 2:15–16).5 In other words, the Greeks’ world vision was conditioned by their particular environment, a specificity that makes that vision inscrutable as well as unstransferable to other people. Analogy is the only tool available for understanding a nation’s particular sensibility and vision, whether Greek, Mexican, or Siberian. Analogy offers the knowledge that just as the Greeks were moved by the sky and trees of their own experience, so are the modern Mexicans moved by theirs—much as the modern scientific traveler is moved by the memory of his Weimar forests. Various critics have characterized Humboldt as an omnivorous, godlike viewer who tries to see and taxonomize everything with an allconsuming gaze, analogous to colonialism.6 Much to the contrary, Humboldt’s works of cultural description, which attempt to account for otherness, are marked by a certain humility. When trying to give a global description of a place like New Spain, Humboldt displays both an unwillingness to step out of the measurable by relying on tools like censuses, economic projections, and linguistic patterns and a reluctance to engage in sweeping analysis, an odd feature, given the ambitious scope of his work. In his cultural description, Humboldt tacitly acknowledges the limits, and risks, of individual human knowledge and vision. It is for this reason that Humboldt is suspicious of other researchers, like the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), who try to colonize all other sensibilities with their own or, like Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811–1899), who forget the sky and trees of their own experience: they forget themselves and their particular horizons. The scientist is infallible only when it comes to accounting for his or her own experience, because subjectivity is unquestionably individual, the only thing Humboldt calls ‘‘inimitable truth’’ (Aspects, 16). But when the researcher needs to recognize other visions, the best recourse is analogy. Yet for Humboldt even analogy has its limitations. It will always fall short of complete understanding because the use of analogy to understand otherness, as the anthropological theorist James Clifford reminds us, consists of replacing one narrative with another (Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 100). It is one thing to gain knowledge of oneself from the scrutiny of nature, as Goethe and Schiller propose, but it is quite another when the object of study can stare back, Humboldt the researcher recognizes, with a stare analogous to his own. The limits of cultural analogy and their use in the understanding of otherness are what Humboldt discovers, as we shall see, in his visit to Mexico. And this process of encountering the confines of perception has a precise ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT’S WORK ON MEXICO

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historical resonance. During this period Mexico itself was developing the means to see itself as separate from Spain. Its society was reorganizing into a republic, and its culture was facing the dramatic task of defining itself on its own terms. Both projects of perception—Humboldt’s and Mexico’s—grapple with the very limits of vision.

A THEORY OF SIGHT Defining Humboldt’s ‘‘theory’’ of perception presents a complicated task, since Humboldt wrote no single theoretical work and considered himself to be first and foremost an experimental scientist whose work was based on observation. Indeed most, if not all, of his work either is empirical or concerns the history of empiricism; any explicitly theoretical concerns are usually well tempered with observational, quantitative, or bibliographic information. Even the most ambitious and philosophical of his works, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung [Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe] (1845), is less a unifying theoretical testament than a catalogue of a lifetime of impressively diverse interests. Despite the explicit avoidance of theoretical discussion in Humboldt’s work, throughout it lies a surprisingly consistent theory of human perception. More specifically, this theory concerns the uses, and the limits, of perception. In order to tease out the particulars of this theoretical concern it is necessary to refer to a broad range of Humboldt’s texts of various genres spanning several decades, especially to his works of travel literature. Barbara Stafford observes that throughout eighteenth-century art there was a gradual blending of the aesthetic and the scientific. Landscape painting—Arcadian, heroic, and rustic—began showing the influence of topographical illustration, what Stafford calls the ‘‘scientific gaze,’’ which ‘‘entails a purposive curiosity that goes hand in hand with the utilitarian ideal of ‘spreading knowledge’ ’’ (Voyage, 40). The illustrated travel account, which emerged in the latter half of the century, provided a perfect arena for an equal marriage of the scientific and the aesthetic. This new genre, initially an extension of the nobility’s ‘‘grand tour’’ of the antiquities of Italy, was largely a result of technological advances in printing, cartography, and scientific instrumentation. A better-informed reading public wanted increasingly precise information from increasingly exotic locales, farther and farther away: Hum-

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boldt apologizes for having gone merely to the Americas and not to ‘‘Greece, Egypt, the Banks of the Euphrates, the islands of the Pacific’’ as had been done recently (Personal Narrative, xxi). The mode of seeing of the scientific traveler, with its wish for scientific objectivity, resulted in a desire for a transparent medium, often at odds with literary self-expression and artistic subjectivity. Georg Forster, Humboldt’s early model, writes that in his account he did not wish to be ‘‘curiously elegant’’ but, rather, strove for ‘‘perspicuity’’ (Voyage, vi, xiv). In his ‘‘Introduction’’ to his personal narrative of travels in the Americas from 1799 to 1804, the Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1814–1825) [Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America], Humboldt displays just such a conflicted wish for a transparent language. He expresses reservations over the corrupting influence of the observer’s subjectivity but finally concedes that subjectivity cannot totally be erased. ‘‘Whenever I wrote in my journal, I had no other motive than the preservation of those fugitive ideas which present themselves to a naturalist, whose life is almost wholly passed in the open air . . . The difficulties I have experienced since my return, in the composition of a considerable number of treatises, for the purpose of making known certain classes of phenomena, insensibly overcame my repugnance to write the narrative of my journey’’ (Personal Narrative, xix). Humboldt the observer retreats to reveal Humboldt the reluctant storyteller. He recognizes that all the sights of interest in the ‘‘open air,’’ ‘‘the summits of volcanoes, or mountains remarkable for their height,’’ include his own ‘‘fugitive ideas’’ which flit about like interesting butterflies—ideas he must record in all fairness as if they were barometric readings or botanical samples. True to the Naturphilosophie of Fichte and Schelling and the Jena of his youth Humboldt finds his own way of addressing the problem of the subject position in scientific investigation: one is to include one’s self in the methodical appreciation of nature, quantifying it as if it were just another wonder of the landscape. In other words Humboldt tries to encode the subject into the object. In his attempt to make observation ‘‘safe from all passion,’’ he codifies a kind of ‘‘naturalized self’’ whose emotional response to the world around him is very much part of that world. Indeed codifying the ‘‘naturalized self’’ and searching for ways to include the subjective response objectively is a lifelong preoccupation for Humboldt, visible from his earliest writings to his swan song Kos-

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mos. Consider, for instance, Humboldt’s fascination for the written culture of the Pre-Columbian Indians. Upon his return from the Americas Humboldt combed the great libraries of Europe in search of surviving codices and included several in his travel books. Number 12 in the Vues des cordillères depicts a ‘‘trial in hieroglyphic writing’’ (see Figure 1). The accompanying text is typical of Humboldt’s legendary, if subtle, sympathy for the Indians. Discussing the scene, he notes how the ‘‘tongues’’—the cartoon-like balloons issuing from the mouths of the figures and representing speech—‘‘are very unequally distributed . . . all of this announces the state of a conquered people’’ (Vues, 172).7 The main interest in these documents, however, is material: Humboldt devotes much of the accompanying text to describing the cactus from which the paper was produced and to the paper-making process itself (‘‘much similarity to ancient Egyptian paper’’ [Vues, 162]). This is a different emphasis from similar works of the period, like Edward King Kingsborough’s 1831 reproduction of the very same codex in Antiquities of Mexico (1831): Kingsborough places the hieroglyphic figures mises en abîme, floating upon the page so a viewer could marvel at their decontextualized oddity (see Figures 2 and 3). Humboldt’s careful tinting, in contrast, approximates the brownish tone of the yellowing edges of the amate paper. He draws attention to the age of the ancient material, which he reproduces carefully. This interest in the physicality of the document amounts to more than a ‘‘transparent’’ representation of an Aztec hieroglyph. This is a depiction of how the ancient codex looks at this precise moment in its slow decomposition and to this particular viewer. We are invited into the eye of the researcher at the very moment he encounters the codex in the library. The history, meaning, and even the use of the hieroglyphs are all secondary to the particular moment of seeing. Humboldt’s final work, his encyclopedic Kosmos (grandly subtitled ‘‘A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe’’), despite its broad title, is a study of human perception. It displays the strains of Romanticism in its insistence on the life-changing effect of nature on the psyche, featuring chapter headings like ‘‘The Elevations and Climactic Relations of many of the most celebrated Mountains . . . considered with reference to the Effect produced on the Mind of the Observer’’ (Cosmos, 1:27–33). It has sections on the development of gardens, on bucolic poetry since antiquity, and on landscape art as well as an entire volume devoted to the ‘‘reflection of the external world’’—a distinction

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‘‘Fragmens de peintures hiéroglyphiques Aztèques’’ from Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des cordillères (Paris, 1810). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University.

FIGURE 1.

FIGURES 2 & 3. Illustrations from Lord Kingsborough, Antiqui-

which implies by extension an internal ties of Mexico (London, 1831), world. Rather than being the universal hisPlate 2 (left), Plate 3 (right). tory of nature its title implies, Kosmos is instead a study of sensibility, a history of Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. human views of nature. The deep connections in Humboldt’s work among theory of perception, scientific knowledge, and subjective response are most intriguing when we recognize the scope of his work on the Americas. It is not limited to observing just the natural landscape. Rather, it includes diagnostic social analysis, as in his examination of Mexico in the Essai politique as well as the picturesque cultural cataloguing seen in the Vues des cordillères. Given the abovementioned theory of subjective observation, Humboldt’s work on the culture of America (and on Mexico, about which he was most specific) poses an interesting question. Humboldt trains his scientist’s eye, with its high regard for subjective response, on other humans as an object of study, rather than on nature. ‘‘Humboldt,’’ one critic remarks, ‘‘applied the procedures of empirical inquiry to the human sphere, this time to historical and sociological research’’ (Bowen, Empiricism, 227). 90


The question is one that Isaiah Berlin, when discussing the eighteenth-century methods of perceiving other cultures, asks about Giambattista Vico and Herder, who have been long held up as protomulticulturalists: ‘‘what are the alternatives to . . . an ability to see beyond the bounds of one’s own Kulturkreis? ’’ (Crooked Timber, 86). An individual’s Kulturkreis (one’s yo y mis circunstancias) is a crucially complicating factor in all inquiry, either when one factors it into supposedly objective observations about the natural world or especially when one is making it the object of study itself. In this last case in particular, human culture presents a very different object of study than do deciduous trees and basaltic rock, yet Humboldt examines them both with the same methodology. How can a scientific researcher, who in good conscience needs to take into account the importance of his or her own subjectivity, account for other subjectivities? It is one thing to explore one’s cognitive processes while studying complex, nonhuman nature; but it is quite another when the object of study can stare back with a stare much like one’s own. Ultimately, Humboldt works under the guiding principle that among a scientist’s most powerful tools is analogy. The grand aim of his scientific project was to demonstrate universal parallelisms, the ‘‘affinities between all forms of organic life,’’ and the ‘‘secret analogy’’ among all natural forms (Cosmos, 1:27). Accordingly, Humboldt also applied analogy to the study of human culture. He viewed collective consciousness as analogous to individual consciousness. A nation’s character is built of its members’ collective—and subjective—response to the immediate environment. In the passage from Ansichten der Natur cited earlier, Humboldt writes that: although the commencement of this civilization is not solely determined by physical relations, yet the direction which it takes, the national character, and the more grave or gay disposition of men, are dependent in high degree on climatic differences . . . How powerfully have the skies of Greece acted on its inhabitants! . . . to recall more familiar objects, who does not feel himself differently affected in the dark shade of the beech, on the hills crowned with scattered fir trees, or on the turfy pasture. (Aspects, 2:15–16)

This passage perhaps recalls the double meaning of ‘‘state’’ (Staat) in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795): it at once encompasses the larger, national character and the individual, emotional ‘‘state’’ of mind which sees and remembers very particular fir trees, pasALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT’S WORK ON MEXICO

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tures, and hills (Aesthetic Education, 219). Humboldt establishes a link between two enormously different scales. The broad ‘‘national character,’’ the ‘‘disposition of its men,’’ is for him a product of that nation’s perception of nature. Yet the only evidence that he feels is needed for this grand generalization is a bit of personal nostalgia: ‘‘the dark shade of the beech,’’ ‘‘hills crowned with scattered fir trees,’’ and ‘‘turfy pasture.’’ This is because the only way of explaining the specific vision of the Greeks—how they were affected by their particular ‘‘skies’’ and unique ‘‘climactic differences’’—is by reporting his own particular experience. As a researcher from another time and another culture, Humboldt cannot himself see the ‘‘skies’’ of antiquity; but he can share in exactly the same process which gave the Greeks their national character: by perceiving nature himself. He cannot see the skies as the Greeks saw them; he can only see that they saw them, much as he sees the ‘‘dark shade of the beech’’ of his particular world.8 For Humboldt, analogy is the most appropriate—if not the only—tool of the scientific observer who is training his eye on culture. The use of analogy to understand otherness has its problems, however, as James Clifford’s critique of ‘‘ethnographic allegory’’ points out: ethnography has the structure of allegory, and both possess the ‘‘propensity to generate another story in the mind of a reader (or hearer), to replace and displace some prior story’’ (Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 100). Analogy and allegory both reduce culture to its minimal narrative elements and in doing so in effect substitute one narrative for another; this practice, while necessary for one culture to understand another in manageable terms, runs the risk of misrepresenting the other culture for the sake of this clean master narrative. Analogy and allegory threaten to produce blindness before they produce insight. Similarly, Humboldt’s science, in its need to allow the expansive self to exist, runs the risk of drowning out the unique voice of the subject matter—the other—by cutting it down to size.When Goethe writes about volcanoes or the maxillar bone of a mammal only to have that natural subject matter slowly dissipate and reveal that his true subject matter is Goethe seeing, this is a neat epistemological maneuver. But when the purported subject matter is other people, having those other people fade out in deference to one’s own mental processes can become dangerous. And Humboldt slowly becomes aware of this danger. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, Humboldt’s description can display

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a certain overwhelming obsession with the measurable. One way of considering his firm grasp on the quantifiable, and his insistence on his own central place as a methodical and regimented observer, is to see it as a certain tyranny of vision. Despite his announced interest in every human aspect of Mexico (from market forces to caste distinctions to engineering wonders like the Mine of the Valenciana), Humboldt’s interest in the particularities of the human condition remains oblique.9 For example, when describing a remarkable Mexican church, Humboldt impatiently jots down in his Mexican journal (1803–1804) ‘‘Church of Chilpancingo, festooned with a pretty Pinus’’—pointedly ignoring the well-known Baroque church and using it merely as a landmark for the botanical specimen (Reise, 316).10 Or, in a passage from the Relation historique, he remarks impatiently (yet typically) how people can distract him from his project: ‘‘I regularly described (and almost always on the spot) the visits I made to the summits of volcanoes, or mountains remarkable for their height; but entries in my journal were interrupted whenever I resided in a town’’ (Personal Narrative, xix). Some critics go so far as to consider Humboldt’s scrutiny as a sort of despotism analogous to the entire project of European colonialism. For instance, according to Mary Louise Pratt, Humboldt presents nature as a gigantized entity ‘‘that dwarfs humans, commands their being . . . defies their powers of perception’’; Humboldt then rises to the challenge of this giant, assuming an ‘‘omniscient stance over both the planet and his reader,’’ becoming a ‘‘godlike’’ visual imperialist who thus overpowers less grandiose voices (Imperial Eyes, 120, 124). I would argue that, quite to the contrary, Humboldt’s obsession with the measurable comes as a result of a keen awareness of the dangers of expansion. His descriptive project—so self-confident when it touches upon nature and natural history—struggles when it comes to other selves, with how to give those others their due place. In short, Humboldt’s work on culture concerns the very limitations, and risks, of the privileged place of the researcher. Likewise, when Humboldt examines the Kingdom of New Spain, he is aware that certain things must always be beyond the powers of his perception. Fascinated by a natural bridge in a canyon in Mexico, he jots rather hurriedly in his journal: At that place there is great darkness and the grotto is quite narrow. That bridge is named God in the local tongue, which is the Otomí language:


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‘‘Dantö’’ means ‘‘pierced rock,’’ a well chosen name. I did not dare sketch that great phenomenon. (Reise, 353)

It is not immediately clear what is so startling about the ‘‘pierced rock’’ that Humboldt ‘‘did not dare sketch it.’’ It is as if the rock were undrawable because of its bizarre name. This given name is cryptic, really two names: one absurdly obvious (‘‘pierced rock’’), the other, simply, ‘‘God.’’ The rock, it would seem, already belongs to others and to their mysterious sensibility that gave it a name, a description, and a value. To capture on paper this sight which has already been captured by others in words would be redundant and perhaps sacrilegious. Humboldt operates under the tacit permanent caveat about cultural vision: however such a powerful vision may seem, not everything is within its reach. Humboldt seems to know that—just as the specific vision of the Greeks is closed to him—the ‘‘national character’’ of Mexico, and whatever sensibility would bestow upon an odd rock the name of ‘‘God,’’ will be fundamentally foreign and nontransferable. He can only approximate this essential sensibility and see what its members see: the same skies, volcanoes, and ruins, but never with their eyes. God indeed can be a rock, for God is deeply, even mysteriously, local; God is in—or simply is—the inscrutable eye of the beholder. From the start, Humboldt’s work acknowledges the potentially ‘‘godlike’’ position of the observer in a scientific model that favors subjective experience. One of Humboldt’s first works, published in the fifth installment of Schiller’s magazine Horen (1795), concerns this very issue. Perhaps trying to match the publication’s literary bent (Humboldt was the only natural scientist invited to contribute), the young researcher submitted quite possibly his only purely artistic work, a classical allegory, albeit one concerning natural science.11 The piece, ‘‘The Vital Force or the Rhodian Genius,’’ is set in the Greek colony of Syracuse. It tells the story of how the Syracusans possessed a mysterious allegorical painting of unknown origin, which had been ‘‘rescued from a shipwrecked vessel’’ (Aspects, 2:252). The painting represents a group of youths who extend their arms toward each other as if to ‘‘indicate a desire of union.’’ Looking ‘‘as a master’’ over this group of mortals stands a god, a ‘‘Genius,’’ with a lit torch in one hand. This painting goes uninterpreted until one day a shipment from Rhodes arrives, bearing what appears to be a companion work. The newly arrived picture offers the next frame in the sequence of events: the Genius is still the central figure; but his head is now drooping, and his torch is extinguished. The 94


youths, conversely, seem to have found each other and embraced; their glance, ‘‘no longer subdued or sad, announced, on the contrary, emancipation from restraint and the fulfillment of long-cherished desires’’ (2:254). The mystified Syracusans ask Epicharmus, a ‘‘philosopher of the Pythagorean school’’ devoted to the study of ‘‘natural things,’’ for an interpretation of the diptych (2:254). Epicharmus squints at the paintings and explains that they are an allegory for the ‘‘vital force’’ that binds the ‘‘raw materials of inorganic nature’’ (2:255). The youths are the elementary substances following their impulses, as iron obeys the loadstone and salt attracts water. The Genius, symbol of this ‘‘vital force’’ and ‘‘an expression . . . of energy,’’ constrains the youths against their basic desires (2:256). When the second picture presents a dead Genius, his torch extinguished, the inorganic youths are again free to embrace. The story ends when Epicharmus, apparently overwhelmed at having unlocked the mysteries of the pictures and the universe, announces that his own ‘‘enfeebled vital power will not long hold . . . soon you will collect my ashes’’ (2:257). Besides offering an obvious allegory for the current theory about the electrical basis of life (at the time Humboldt wrote this he was conducting galvanic experiments),12 the ‘‘Rhodian Genius’’ is also an allegory about interpretation and a cautionary tale about allegories themselves. The ekphrastic ‘‘Genius’’ of the painting is a god, because the ‘‘commanding glance of his eye’’ can constrain nature, but only for so long. He is merely a ‘‘Genius’’ or a minor god and apparently a mortal one at that. He is at least as mortal and fallible as the story’s other ‘‘genius’’—wise old Epicharmus, the interpreter. The two meanings of ‘‘genius,’’ one a deity, the other human, play off each other. A genius (génie), according to Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie, is someone with manic enthusiasm and a particularly honed vision, who is interested in everything under the sun (‘‘tout ce qui est dans la nature . . . il observe rapidement un grand espace, une multitude d’êtres’’ [everything that lies in nature . . . he quickly takes in great spaces, a multitude of beings]), and who is deeply in tune with his own emotional response to all he encounters (‘‘ne reçoit pas une idée qu’elle n’éveille un sentiment’’ [he does not receive any ideas that do not awaken a feeling]), like Humboldt himself (Encyclopédie, 2:582).13 Most importantly, though, a génie is fallible (‘‘il y répand fréquemment des brillantes erreurs’’ [he scatters about brilliant errors]) (Diderot, Encyclopédie, 2:583). The self-referential message of the ‘‘Rhodian ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT’S WORK ON MEXICO

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Genius’’ is a caveat, a reminder that methodical scrutiny has its limits and its costs. Clifford’s ‘‘ethnographic allegory,’’ the tool of methodological analogy which replaces one narrative with another, is extremely useful to understanding the ‘‘other.’’ It raises problems about fair representation, but it can also be the cause of the interpreter’s undoing. Perception and the geniuses who try to marshal it are fragile, even mortal. Here, perhaps, lies the explanation for Humboldt’s silence about certain aspects of foreign culture. In their statistical superfluity, his descriptions indeed are capable of a certain blindness—they can even edge toward a misanthropic flatness which can ignore the human world in favor of the natural world (as when Humboldt only notes the magnificent Baroque church as a mere marker for the ‘‘pretty Pinus’’). On the microlevel Humboldt’s statistical observations remain faithful to the rule of subjective perception: his personal experience is the only reliable constant, and numbers will always be secondary to what one sees. ‘‘They speak of 150,000 (inhabitants) . . . I don’t believe it, all the streets are pretty much empty’’ (Reise, 326).14 When this litmus test expands to material culture, strange gaps result: witness Humboldt’s refusal to explain or draw the ‘‘God-rock’’ and his purely material interest in the Pre-Columbian codices alluded to earlier. This interest concerns the codices’ existence as antiquities, and their meaning and history are beyond his field of vision. The only valid way the researcher can incorporate these antiquities in his research is to record how they strike him, as physical things to be searched for, touched, and seen: they are objects of his own experience. Humboldt’s work can be ‘‘flat’’ for the same reasons that William Wordsworth’s Prelude can be long-winded: although the depiction of the writer’s mental processes is startlingly brilliant, the mental process itself is not necessarily that interesting.

MEXICAN KURIOS: ‘‘ VUES DES MONUMENS ET PEUPLES ’’ The good (father, sun, capital) is thus the hidden, illuminating, blinding source of logos. And since one cannot speak of that which enables one to speak . . . one will speak only of that which speaks . . . Logos is thus a resource. One must turn to it, and not merely when the solar source is present and risks burning the eyes if stared at. One has to turn away toward the logos when the sun seems to withdraw during 96


its eclipse. Dead, extinguished, or hidden, that star is more dangerous than ever. [We] have followed this line so as to move from logos to the father, so as to tie speech to the kurios, the master, the lord, another name given in the Republic to the good-sun-capital-father. —JACQUES DERRIDA, DISSEMINATION (82, 84)

The interest by Humboldt and his contemporaries in the subjectivity of the researcher must be taken in context. In keeping with the Romantic shift toward the subjective, Naturphilosophie tended to question the purity of scientific objectivity. When Humboldt’s friend Goethe wrote in his Theory of Color (1808) that ‘‘no one will dispute a direct relationship between light and the eye, but it is more difficult to think of the two as being simultaneously one and the same,’’ he problematized the Cartesian notion that the subject and the object of study are clearly distinct (Scientific Studies, 163). Naturphilosophen like Goethe, Schelling, and Fichte claimed that the object—in Goethe’s case color —and the subject—the eye of the beholder—are really part of a unified process that cannot exist without both (Georges Cuvier, Napoleon Bonaparte’s chief scientist, criticized Naturphilosophie for its ‘‘confusion of the moral with the physical and the metaphorical with the logical’’ [Jardine, ‘‘Naturphilosophie,’’ 230]).Without an observing eye, there is no color, basaltic rock, or chemical reaction.15 The important implication of this is that all empirical knowledge is necessarily inscribed with the subjectivity that generated it. In other words, a detailed study on the physical properties of light, or on igneous rock, or on bone physiology will also yield insight into the human process of looking and thinking. Goethe even makes knowledge of one’s self a virtual goal of scientific education and vice versa: 16 in order for soul-searchers to discover their own sensibility, their vision so to speak, they need to engage in the methodical and productive observation of everything which is explicitly not themselves—the mysterious external world—because, in the process of deciphering that complex world, sight itself will become visible.17 Likewise, in the majority of his work, Humboldt proceeds under the premise that when one studies the complexities of nature, one does so in a kind of silence in which one hears the sounds and rhythms of one’s own breathing. Yet when the object of study is other people, with their own breathing and their own rhythms, Humboldt bumps into the question that James Clifford asks of modern ethnography: ‘‘who is actually the author of the field notes? . . . If ethnography is part of what Roy ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT’S WORK ON MEXICO

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Wagner calls ‘the invention of culture,’ its activity is plural and beyond the control of any individual’’ (Clifford and Marcus, Predicament, 45, 50). In the face of this question, Humboldt concludes that it is sometimes better to remain silent, not daring to ‘‘sketch that great phenomenon,’’ to speak about another’s idea of ‘‘God,’’ instead limiting oneself to the fieldnotes from one’s own experience. We begin to see in Humboldt a method for distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate ways of narrating culture. He offers a criterion for regulating analogy, the descriptive tool that is the only alternative to silence. One of the leading scientific debates in Humboldt’s time concerned the geological origins of the earth. The Neptunists, who believed that the sea had been the principal force shaping the geology of the planet, opposed the Vulcanists, who ascribed that force to subterranean heat and volcanic activity.18 Humboldt treads a fine line between both, although he tends to prefer the Vulcanist camp.19 The Neptunists and the Vulcanists each favored creation myths which threaded their way into their empirical discussions: the world created by flood or the world created by fire. The Neptunists’ master narrative of the great flood had consciously biblical and classical resonances to give it cultural weight. Humboldt, who championed the notion that everything in creation is connected organically (from groups of people on opposite continents, to ancient geologic evidence, to myths of creation),20 of course saw the benefit of such associations and the need for such allegorizing. When discussing the work of Baron von Bunsen in a letter to his friend Varnhagen von Ense, Humboldt expresses concern for the ‘‘credit’’ of Bunsen’s ‘‘scientific fame’’ because of Bunsen’s untoward interest in the historical truth of the myth: [Bunsen has] threatening shoals of books, teeming with hypotheses on aboriginal nations . . . as also on the locality of Paradise, for which a map is already ordered . . . [Also] maps on the opinions of people may range from the ship-binding myth on the seashore and the Himalaya to Ararat, and to Aramea Kibotos, even to the Mexican Cocox;21 fanciful productions of fictions, which are known also to the Bible of the Mormons. (Letters, 222)

On another occasion, however, Humboldt invokes the same myth of the flood himself, albeit on quite different terms than those of Bunsen, the wishful cartographer of Eden. Humboldt writes in his Mexican

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journal about his arrival in the port of Acapulco and about the surprising stowaways he finds in his instrument trunks: upon opening our trunks, we infected the house with cockroaches, scorpions from Guayaquil as well as ants . . . The vessels which come from that port filled with cacao recall Noah’s ark. There is no region in the world more filled with vermin and insects than Guayaquil. Lizards from the gekko family amused themselves at night by chasing the newcomers. They are the Canary birds of Acapulco. They cry the whole night, gac, gac, gac. (Reise, 311)

Humboldt’s narrative is busy almost to the point of sensory overload. The first-person experience (‘‘upon opening our trunks, we infected the house with cockroaches’’; my emphasis) is interrupted with the voice of the data-obsessed scientist (‘‘the vessels which come from that port filled with cacao . . . no region in the world more filled with vermin’’). Uncanny replacements threaten to dissipate the passage: the familiar (Canary birds) are replaced with the outlandish (gekko lizards crying ‘‘gac, gac, gac’’). The passage offers what James Clifford calls ‘‘unruly experience,’’ calling out for some order, some kind of referential framework, before these doublings become overwhelming (Clifford and Marcus, Predicament, 13). Humboldt invokes the myth of the flood precisely to create this order, bringing a familiar story in order to replace—and organize—the incoherent, otherworldly story of foreign cockroaches pouring forth from a steamer trunk full of scientific instruments. He is demonstrating a viable use of myth, as opposed to Bunsen’s misuse of it: only in conjunction with an ‘‘I’’ who can provide details—sounds and smells, temperature readings, but also truelife chaos—is the use of the myth of the flood appropriate. A researcher needs to have seen with his own eyes in order to warrant such analogic myths. Similarly, in Ansichten der Natur (a book in which he refers to firsthand experience from his numerous travels in order to establish laws of global ecology) Humboldt notes that the Mediterranean basin lacks large trees and ‘‘vegetable mould’’ and its rocks have maritime sedimentary layers. For him this is evidence of the ‘‘great catastrophe which occasioned the formation of the Mediterranean’’ and washed away the strata necessary for such growth; he conjectures—in a footnote—that an ancient memory of this catastrophe could be the source for the universal myth of the flood (Aspects, 2:78–83). Bunsen, in contrast, be-


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sides being guilty of scientific quackery, is guilty of taking the myth of the flood literally, as an expression of a reality that can be mapped and charted. The problem is that this reality and the subjectivity that generated the mythical story to explain it are simply not his to take. To superimpose a myth onto the enormity of the world is to borrow a form inappropriately, as Humboldt suggests in questioning the dubious ‘‘Mormon Bible.’’ Humboldt issues a similar criticism about a provincial Mexican priest (who barely warrants an ironic aside in his journal) who believes in the physical location of Hell: ‘‘He showed me on a large sheet a drawing for the astronomical system of the saints. There were spots for hell, children, the damned, Saturn, Jupiter and even the planet Herschel. Actopan valley borders the Valley of Mexico by a narrow gorge’’ (Reise, 354). Unlike the gross overreachings of Bunsen or the Mexican priest, Humboldt offers personal experiences of ‘‘cockroaches and scorpions,’’ experiences which call out for mediation. In the case of such deeply personal and deeply subjective experience, it is appropriate to superimpose a familiar myth in order to achieve such mediation. Humboldt does not limit his criticism to those who overstep the bounds of their personal experience and their particular vision. He also offers criticism of those who do not see enough, who are blind to the natural world and display a lack of Ansichten (views), a lack that ultimately also leads to self-blindness. In one passage from his Mexican journal Humboldt, typically hesitant to criticize overtly the Spanish authorities that allowed him free access to the Spanish colonies, expresses oblique displeasure about the Catholic church: The countryside towards Atotonilco is quite pleasant and quite cultivated. On the left toward the horizon can be seen the monjas [nuns] of Atotonilco el Chico, grotesque porphyritic rock formations which represent enormous gaps, Zacken [ jagged ridges], or sitting nuns in the imaginations of Spaniards, who dream of nothing but convents and monks. (Reise, 352)

The superstitious Catholics cannot open their eyes enough to see beyond ‘‘convents and monks.’’ They cannot step beyond themselves really to look at things in order to name them without allowing extraneous narratives to take over and silence the landscape. This blindness is related to Bunsen’s, the overenthusiastic mapper of Eden who suppresses himself (and his common sense) too much in order to study his

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object. In another passage, Humboldt expresses one of the few harsh judgments of Mexicans over a similar indifference: Great difficulty in Mexico for learning the names of places, mountains, sources, rivers. Indifference: ‘‘Who knows?’’ Proof of great possessions, and of a culture from which great indifference toward the objects which nature presents. (Reise, 318)

For Humboldt, toponyms, because of their very oddness, are crucial. For instance, the pre-Hispanic–sounding name of Mount Chimborazo (the ascent of which was a high point of his travels) becomes a running reference in his work, and the word ‘‘Chimborazo’’ becomes an almost fetishized tag. Foreign toponyms imply a national character at work, perceiving ‘‘skies’’ and ‘‘climatic differences,’’ an initial Adam who has seen and named the landscape before the traveler’s arrival, a national character which authorizes its existence through its own particularity of vision. A lack of such a vision is tantamount to a lack of culture. At one end of the spectrum of blindness are these Mexican provincials, guilty of not seeing at all (‘‘Who knows?’’) and blind to the basic attributes of their ‘‘great possessions.’’ At the other end of the spectrum are obsessively blind Catholics, as well as Bunsen, willfully suppressing their own circumstances—they overstep the limits and obligations of their vision. Humboldt’s awareness that unchecked Ansichten (views) can quiet other voices has deeply resonant political implications. His voice was one of the loudest in what the Italian critic Antonello Gerbi calls the ‘‘Dispute of the New World.’’ This eighteenth-century debate was a product of the confluence of Enlightenment social philosophy and empirical thought. The former had produced notions of universal human equality as well as the modern conception of national identity. The latter demanded an experimental basis for such claims. Contributors to the debate used the American continent, more specifically the nature of the American continent, as a case study. Countless eighteenthcentury thinkers (including Edmund Burke, Kant, Voltaire, Herder, Buffon, and Bernardin de St. Pierre) offered opinions on the matter. Buffon, one of the extremists, argued that the Americas (and its inhabitants) were ‘‘weaker’’ and more ‘‘immature’’ than Europe, as demonstrated by a systematic comparison of their respective plants, animals, and geology.22 Humboldt wrote in direct reaction to such extremes, and much


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of his life’s work was aimed at rejecting the notion that America and the Americans were little more than a stunted version of Europe: ‘‘[I] repel the depressing assumption of inferior and of superior races of men’’ (Cosmos, 1:358). Of course, as a researcher, Humboldt cannot entirely abide by inscrutability. A scientist’s role is precisely to scrutinize. The tension between total examination and his search for a mode that allows the voice (and the plight) of the other to co-exist with his own sometimes places Humboldt at odds with his own project. For instance, his mostly dry statistical analysis of the Mexican nation, the Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, is a fine example of a work at odds with itself. On the surface, it seems geared toward coddling the Spanish colonial government by announcing to the Crown that it has much to be proud of in its colony. Humboldt offers optimistic projections concerning the yield of precious metals from the largest mines in Mexico, is vastly impressed with Mexico City as a capital on a par with any European metropolis, and shows enough contempt for the wretched Indians to allay any Spanish criollo sense of superiority. On a deeper level, however, the Essai hides an indictment of that same colonial government. For example, Humboldt admires the architectural and cultural refinement of the once-great Aztec and Maya civilizations (if despising their brutality); he regards their artifacts as objects from a classical past not unlike Asia’s—again a nod toward the criollos’ sense of superiority. Yet gradually, upon contrasting this innocent admiration for the relics of the ancient civilizations with the current miserable condition of the Indians, it becomes clear to the reader that between the ancient Aztecs and their modern descendants, the wretchedly poor Indians, lie centuries of Spanish rule. However encouraging the Essai is about the individual parts of the country, the picture as a whole amounts to an accusation of financial mismanagement and oppressive social and governmental hierarchy (see Brading, First Americans, 231). The anticolonial message can be read between the lines: the rosy picture Humboldt offers about Mexico is in potentiality. In a subtle statistical argument, Humboldt argues that the ‘‘odious monopoly’’ of commerce with Spain will prove ‘‘disadvantageous even to the mother country’’ (Political Essay, 3:490, 4:107). Greatness will come to New Spain only if it frees itself from the stultifying colonial government and achieves self-rule.23 Humboldt has a balance in mind: suppression of one’s subjective

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FIGURE 4. ‘‘Vue de l’intérieur de la Grotte d’Antiparos’’

vision—ignoring the views of one’s immediate nature (Ansichten der Natur)—leads to error and blindness, as with the Catholics who ignore their landscape, or Bunsen, who suppresses his place in time. But allowtesy of Beinecke Rare Book ing one’s subjective vision to expand, unLibrary, Yale University. checked, can lead to silencing other visions and thus producing another kind of blindness, or deafness, as it were. And this deafness to other voices can lead ultimately to downfall, as it did for the Rhodian Genius and for the Spanish colonial government of New Spain. from Marie-Gabriel-AugusteFlorent de Choiseul Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (Paris, 1782 and 1809). Cour-

‘‘ VUES DES MONUMENS’’ A standard convention of travel narratives and views of antiquities is to include in the illustrations the travelers themselves, sporting stovepipe hats and walking-sticks, in the foreground of a panoramic view. This was often done for purposes of scale, as for instance in an image from Marie-Gabriel-Auguste-Florent de Choiseul Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782), where we see travelers in the usual pose of pointing to an enormous local wonder, in this case a set of stalagmites and stalactites in a cave (see Figure 4).


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FIGURE 5. Detail of ‘‘Veduta del Tempio ottangolare

Rustic-looking natives often decorate the scene, sometimes indolently lounging, as in scenes from Giambattista Piranesi’s Pianti di Roma (1778?) (see Figure 5). Humboldt employs this generic convennecke Rare Book Library, tion several times: for instance, in his illusYale University. tration of the ‘‘Pyramide de Cholula’’ (see Figure 6). This brings us to one of the first and most magnificent illustrations in Vues des cordillères, the ‘‘Vue de la Grande Place de Mexico,’’ based on an earlier print by the Spanish academic artist José Joaquín Fabregat. It depicts the plaza and its equestrian statue of Charles IV designed by the famous architect Manuel Tolsá. In this view of the plaza, Humboldt complicates the formula somewhat (see Figure 7). True to form, he places the figures of the travelers at one corner of the foreground, including the group of lounging natives. He mentions in the accompanying text that they are ‘‘Guachinangos, or the lower class of Mexicans’’ (Vues, 61); but the European travelers in the picture are nonetheless engaged in an exchange with them (see Figure 8). This is an appropriate collation of symbolisms: in this illustration, the traveler, careful to place himself inside the margin of the composition, tries to engage the locals in a discussion about the interesting sights.24 Yet notice the triangular vision: the travelers look toward the di Minerva, Medica’’ from Giambattista Piranesi, Pianti di Roma (Rome, 1778?). Courtesy of Bei-

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‘‘Pyramide de Cholula’’ from Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des

FIGURE 6.

cordillères (Paris, 1810). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University.

FIGURE 7.

‘‘Vue de la Grande Place de

Mexico’’ from Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des cordillères (Paris, 1810). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University.

FIGURE 8. Detail of ‘‘Vue de la Grande Place de Mexico’’

local wonder pointed to by the helpful guachinango, who is turning his head to look at the travelers. The traveler is free to capture the scenery for himself and even engage the locals in conversation about where Courtesy of Beinecke they live, but he can never see the sight they Rare Book Library, Yale see: a bizarrely dressed foreigner looking at University. them and at their home. The scientific traveler can capture the local views but never the locals’ views. The compositional center of the engraving is, of course, the imposing statue of Charles IV (just as the compositional center of the Essai politique is the regal authorities to whom it is addressed). In the center of the foreground, another guachinango shields a child from the sun or, perhaps, from the brilliance of the statue (see Figure 9). According to Humboldt’s journal, the statue of the king, ‘‘commanding, ruling, and in doing so mild and gracious like Marcus Aurelius,’’ is dressed in appropriate classical ‘‘drapery, indescribably beautiful’’ (Reise, 339). Although Humboldt invites the reader to notice the guachinangos’ typical ‘‘costume,’’ upon closer scrutiny it becomes apparent that the diminutive guachinango interlocutor is, oddly enough, also dressed in classical garb. It seems that both of these classically dressed figures—the vagrant and the king—are bound by some fundamental showing foreground figures, from Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des cordillères (Paris, 1810).

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FIGURE 9. Detail of ‘‘Vue de la Grande Place de

Mexico’’ showing centerground figures and statue of Charles IV, from Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des cordillères (Paris, 1810). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University.

sameness. Humboldt describes the statue with a plaintive memento mori: ‘‘Will the statue endure?’’ (‘‘Wird die Statue von langer Dauer sein?’’ in the original [Reise, 339– 340]). Humboldt asks this question ostensibly because he witnessed the impressive yet precarious installation of the statue, an event he recorded in his journal:

Luck took a strange turn. The statue was removed from the wagon, and the whole piece was fastened with several arcía (Agave) cables to an iron pole, which hung over the king’s head. This pole was raised up in the air with blocks and tackle. This elevation lasted hardly ten minutes in the presence of the audience and viceregent . . . But a cable tore, and the scaffolding . . . began to sink. The king had to be left hanging in the air until the afternoon . . . He spent the night in the air, but he was supported somewhat with the belly of the horse. The following morning he was gradually lowered into the holes. A main cable ripped; the whole piece and the scaffolding groaned . . . We thought we’d be smashed to pieces . . . We thought that we had escaped a shipwreck, since every bystander was at risk. (Reise, 339–340) ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT’S WORK ON MEXICO

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The message of the memento mori is that all figures of authority —kings, geniuses, gods, and scientists—are fragile and can well find themselves suspended in an awkward, self-aware pause overnight. There is the constant danger of graceless, perfunctory collapse (as indeed the Spanish king toppled under the weight of Napoleon six years later, in turn instigating the colonies to topple his viceroy). The masses that make up a nation are only nominally under the rule of such fragile authorities once they recognize that frailty. The people of Mexico are, as Humboldt implies throughout the Essai politique, potentially independent. He writes that the streets of Mexico swarm with ‘‘twenty to thirty thousand wretches (Saragates, Guachinangos) of whom the greatest number pass the night sub dio,’’ unceremoniously spending the night in the plaza (Political Essay, 2:235)—just like the hanging king, sub dio: meaning both outdoors in the street and under a watchful God. The caveat about the limits of authority is akin to the caveat about the limits of perception. Humboldt, the observing ‘‘genius,’’ is himself left hanging and in danger of being ‘‘smashed to pieces’’ by his object of study. The threat of the ‘‘shipwreck,’’ with its image of people scurrying for cover, recalls other fragile vessels of knowledge, like the ark full of scientific instruments and cockroaches. Both of these vessels are overrun by unsettling events and meanings that demand an organizing narrative, which, like all fictions, is a construction. The resulting visions— which are well composed and appear ‘‘great’’—are nonetheless fragile presentations and can be overshadowed even in their magnificence. The positive, if somewhat isolating, subtext to this epistemological skepticism is an almost serene optimism about the fundamental equality of every person’s vision. Buffon, who also had a theory about the essential sameness of all people, used this theory as an excuse to patronize: the Americas were simply less far along in the developmental path of sameness, a dangerous argument as old as the Conquest. Humboldt, in contrast, is less expansive—if not to say ambitious—in his analysis of foreign societies. Just as a king or a Prussian baronscientist has the authority to command the attention of a viewer, so can a lowly guachinango, who can point to the world for others to see— if not how he sees—at least that he sees. It seems that the odd blindnesses of Humboldt’s cultural description have a fundamentally equalizing and democratic purpose. Finally, we must step away from our subject at hand to return to the question of how all of this fits into a study of Mexican culture. It 108


is a matter of debate whether to see Humboldt as a new Columbus— the ‘‘scientific rediscoverer’’ of the American continent (as the famous nineteenth-century cartographer Carl Ritter would dub him [Brading, First Americans, 534])—or as the midwife of Mexican modernity (as Enrique Krauze and others would have it). But it is impossible to dismiss the coincidence that—soon after Humboldt’s work appeared— Mexico went through a transformation in which the criollos but also the teeming masses of guachinangos (whose street cries Madame Calderón de la Barca recorded so innocently) rose against colonial rule. Mexico began learning to see itself as a distinct and independent entity, subject only to itself. And both projects of vision—Humboldt’s and Mexico’s—are analogous projects of perception where, after a discomfiting process, there is a recognition of the limits of vision: others’ as well as one’s own. A tired and elderly Humboldt, weary of his role of minister to the court, wrote his friend Varnhagen von Ense about something he had encountered in his bedside reading: ‘‘Sire, acknowledge God on earth as in heaven in order that he not tire of monarchies, softly governing if kings softly make use of Him . . . If God tires of monarchies, he will give another form to the world.’’ I kept that strange little note [from the Letters of Antonio Pérez, ‘‘consejero’’ to Philip II of Spain], with the prophecy, ‘‘that God will tire of Kings,’’ on my table for several days. (Letters, 141)25


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PART 3

The Revolution of 1910


CHAPTER 4

José Vasconcelos and the Necessities of Failure

Navegaré por las olas civiles con remos que no pesan. [I will embark upon on civil waves with weightless oars.] —RAMÓN LÓPEZ VELARDE, ‘‘LA SUAVE PATRIA’’ (1916)

Vasconcelos is perhaps best known on two counts: for his theories on race, set forth in his influential essay La raza cósmica (1925), and for his patronage of the arts, especially that of the Mexican Muralists.Vasconcelos carried out this patronage during the euphoric years immediately following the Mexican Revolution, when he held several important posts, first as rector of the National University and then as minister of public education in the administration of president Alvaro Obregón (1921–1925). During these years Vasconcelos was effectively the arbiter of state culture—a ‘‘caudillo cultural,’’ as Enrique Krauze (Caudillos culturales) describes him. Vasconcelos proved to be both an outstanding administrator and a clever institutional visionary, and he had a long-lasting impact on the shifting sands of the Mexican intellectual landscape. President Obregón’s was the first stable government since the end of the Revolution and operated without the disadvantages, or the benefits, of an ingrained bureaucracy, which had recently been purged by the war. Because of this bureaucratic vacuum, Vasconcelos found himself with an unprecedented carte blanche: he managed to turn the Ministry of Education, which before the Revolution had been an underfunded civil-service backwater, into the centerpiece of the revolutionary government. Roberto González Echevarría has pointed out that in Latin America the dictator and the educator have much in common, and Vasconcelos is an interesting case in point (Voice, 14–15). Through the power of the strongman Obregón, Vasconcelos became an educational dictator. Taking his cue from his nearest model, the Soviet postrevolutionary government, Vasconcelos patterned his educational project and

his administrative persona after Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, the people’s commissar for education appointed by Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Like Lunacharsky, Vasconcelos convinced the government that education was crucial to shaping the new nation. He managed to obtain the largest budgets ever allotted to public education in Mexican history and nearly doubled the number of schools, teachers, and enrolled students.1 Vasconcelos launched ambitious literacy and cultural programs; he announced goals of renovating the teaching profession, making books universally available, and renewing the arts. As he describes in his engaging Memorias, Vasconcelos’s literacy campaigns were initially staffed by idealistic volunteers from the professional ranks, whom he called ‘‘misioneros’’ [missionaries] driven by a revolutionary fervor. When this fervor cooled and Vasconcelos needed to look elsewhere for teachers, he made the unprecedented move of opening the teaching profession, until then almost exclusively male, to women (‘‘Se convoca,’’ in Guillén, Vasconcelos, ‘‘apresurado de Dios,’’ 150–153). He invited other Latin American intellectuals, most notably the Chilean poet, educator, and future Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, to participate in this initiative. He even began a program of child-literacy volunteers, in which newly alphabetized youngsters would return to their communities and teach their parents and other adults what they had learned at school.2 Vasconcelos also turned the federal government into the largest book publisher in Latin America in order to distribute hundreds of thousands of free copies to the population. It is at the height of his power as ‘‘caudillo cultural’’ that Vasconcelos encouraged the Mexican Muralists, including painters like David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Roberto Montenegro, and Jean Charlot. In his patronage of the Muralists, Vasconcelos again followed Lunacharsky’s example. Matching European Modernism’s penchant for novelty with the postrevolutionary enthusiasm for a new social order, Lunacharsky had made the Soviet Union a safe haven for the avant-garde. He set forth an ambitious project of state patronage for artists like Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Marc Chagall.These artists in turn staged experimental theater in public squares, proposed transparent government buildings made entirely of glass, and even painted the trees outside the Kremlin with whimsical patterns of blue and orange. But Lunacharsky’s protégés also made art to serve the proletariat. They designed railroad stations, efficient stoves, military camouflage, and furniture (Russell, Meanings, 233–245). Similarly, if on a smaller scale, Vasconcelos charged his Muralists with the creation of 114

THE REVOLUTION OF 1910

public art for his administration’s buildings, which consisted mostly of colonial-era mansions or viceregal palaces reclaimed in the service of the people. Despite his crucial importance in sponsoring the Muralists, Vasconcelos’s period of direct influence was relatively brief. Only some of the Muralists’ early works (such as some of the first walls of the Secretaría de Educación Pública) show a clear debt to his philosophies. Diego Rivera’s Creation (1921) is almost a résumé of Vasconcelos’s worldview: it has elements of numerology, mystical union, symbolic symmetry, prophetic messianism, and aestheticism. But in time Rivera and the rest of the Muralists grew apart from their early patron so markedly that Rivera viciously caricatured Vasconcelos in the murals of the Palacio Nacional by including him in a pack of graying, top-hatted courtiers of the dictatorship and by portraying him as a funnel-headed bureaucrat. The difference between Vasconcelos and the Muralists went deeper than simple personality conflicts. Despite their common elements of anti-imperialism, the programmatic and defiant Marxism that eventually defined the Muralists is diametrically opposed to Vasconcelos’s aristocratic Platonism.3 The Muralists’ attempt to explain history in terms of broken social contracts—like Rivera’s depictions of peasant oppression in the Palacio and Siqueiros’s mythification of proletarian revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata—operated in a fundamentally different ideological register than Vasconcelos’s synthetic ideas of ‘‘symphonic order’’ and his ahistorical notions of a ‘‘cosmic race.’’ Vasconcelos expressed these concepts in La raza cósmica, published at the end of his tenure as cultural dictator. His ideas of episodic and synthetic history owe much to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1919). La raza cósmica is also a lecture to the youth of America in the tradition of works calling for a unified America like José Martí’s Nuestra América (1891) and José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900).4 Yet, instead of offering an inflammatory call to arms, rhetorically precise argumentation, or a rousing wake-up message to the youth of the continent like the one in Ariel, La raza cósmica contains a prophecy to the ‘‘Latin race,’’ predicting the dawning of a new age during which the previously dominant races—such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Mongols—will become one with ‘‘las razas latinas.’’ It can be difficult for the modern reader to digest this essay. It is hard, for instance, to reconcile radically pragmatic uses of Vasconcelos’s work—like the Chicano movement’s appropriation of the term JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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‘‘raza cósmica,’’ a phrase well suited to sloganeering—with Vasconcelos’s more problematic positions. In any case, Vasconcelos is often held up as a progressive saint of mestizaje (racial hybridity), for claiming that miscegenation makes the ‘‘Latin’’ people superior in ‘‘elementos creativos’’ [creative elements] (the highest human attribute, according to him) to the anemic Anglo-Saxons, who are uncreatively technical and bent on world domination.5 But Vasconcelos’s arguments can be read as the worst kind of essentialism, a version of Nazism’s notion of the master race. Furthermore, Vasoncelos’s championing of racial synthesis only goes so far, for it does not extend to culture. For instance, in De Robinsón a Odiseo (1935), his statement of educational philosophy as well as the res gestae of his time as minister of education, Vasconcelos argues that the best way to help the downtrodden Indian is through total cultural assimilation into criollo (i.e., middle-class Spanish) culture, which, he believes, is the most generous culture of all and the one best suited to assimilate all others. Despite its neoplatonic trappings and epic language, his educational writings are at heart an argument for bourgeois education, barely camouflaged by mythical rhetoric: they call for table manners, music lessons, regular baths, and reading the classics. Rejecting what he sees as the ‘‘Saxon’’ mistake of ‘‘exterminating the brutes,’’ Vasconcelos proposes to educate them through a sense of refinement.6 In order to understand Vasconcelos’s often bizarre racial theories, it is necessary to contextualize them within a long history of a national Mexican preoccupation with race. Every period from the Conquest to the present has attempted to deal with the Indian presence in different ways.7 During the nineteenth century positivism, the highly influential social philosophy founded by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), introduced a new language with which to discuss the Indian past. Since it championed tight institutional stewardship, Comte’s model of social progress served both colonialist powers of Europe and plutocratic governments of Latin America, a phenomenon widely studied by Leopoldo Zea. In many ways Vasconcelos’s theory of race is both an ironic response to and a continuation of positivism’s diagnostic scrutiny. Vasconcelos is no less of an essentialist than Carlos Octavio Bunge or Alcides Arguedas, except that, instead of using the signs of racial difference negatively, he ironizes the scientistic observations of the ‘‘pathologists’’ through his unapologetic, Spenglerian irrationalism; instead of seeing racial essence as a source of sickness within, he turns it into a 116


reason to celebrate. He maintains that the Indian and black blood of Latin America will provide the needed ‘‘vitality’’ as well as the victorious template for the synthesis of the final race. Ironically, Vasconcelos accuses the aggressive North of exactly the same sort of essentialism he proposes, claiming that the Anglo-Saxon is unable to overcome prejudice and that only ‘‘delante un negro’’ [in front of a black] can the Anglo feel pure and different (‘‘La raza cósmica,’’ 112). Vasconcelos jests that any Anglo-Saxon attempt at the final synthesis reserved for ‘‘Latins’’ would produce a failed, segregated ‘‘Anglotown’’ instead of his utopian, fused ‘‘Universópolis’’ (‘‘La raza cósmica,’’ 110). As this short synopsis of Vasconcelos’s ideas and sources suggests, his work is riddled with contradictions and what may or may not be intentional ironies. These contradictions and ironies, as I will discuss in greater detail, constantly threaten to undermine his designs. An unusual feature of Vasconcelos’s projects is that virtually all of them, on some level, fail. Despite their occasional brilliance and indisputable influence on generations of Mexicans, all of his initiatives (both political and literary) at best are mixed successes, at worst disastrous implosions, as was his run for the presidency in 1929. Vasconcelos’s educational projects as well as his vision for a racial utopia and his philosophical systems are either outright failures or at least constantly threaten to fail. In fact, failure is so consistent in his work that it seems almost a deliberate and familiar fixture. I will argue that, for Vasconcelos, failure was more than a bad habit; it became necessary to his brand of idealism. In considering Vasconcelos’s complicated, symbiotic relationship with failure, it is important to keep in mind that his greatest project was nothing less than to reinvent the future of his nation, and ultimately the Latin ‘‘race,’’ through an idealized aesthetic education. The consideration of failure carries serious implications when we acknowledge the centrality of Vasconcelos’s educational ideas to postrevolutionary Mexico’s sense of itself. Furthermore, when Vasconcelos proposed to reinvent the nation through education, what he meant was an education through ideal exemplarity. I will expand on this question: how do the failures of Vasconcelos—the Vasconcelos who helped set the agenda for the new nation and who was himself the ultimate exemplar in the hierarchy of role models—figure into the formation of national identity? Or, put another way, how does failure bridge the national and the personal? We can witness the impact of positivism on Vasconcelos and others JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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of his generation by the strength of their eventual reaction against it. Comte’s philosophy is predicated on the possibility of objective knowledge. One of the symptoms of the wane of positivism is the reconsideration of the place of the individual in the supposedly neutral process of assessing culture. In Mexico the reaction to the positivist ‘‘científicos’’ reached critical mass with Vasconcelos’s lecture ‘‘Don Gabino Barreda y las ideas contemporáneas’’ (1907), delivered in his debut as a public intellectual to the Ateneo de la Juventud, the influential group that included Vasconcelos, the poets and essayists Alfonso Reyes and Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and the philosopher Antonio Caso. Vasconcelos’s lecture is a philosophical position paper, outlining the need to move beyond positivism. In it he at once acknowledges the importance of Barreda as the founder of Mexican positivism and encourages his generation to transcend Barreda’s fatherly influence. It is also implicitly a call to arms against the patriarchal dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. At issue for the ateneístas was the problem of individual will. Comtean philosophy—and the Díaz dictatorship which allowed it to flower, for that matter—held that individual freedom would result only after a long and sustained institutional stewardship by those who knew better. According to positivism, individual freedom was the highest state of human development. Freedom needed to be earned through an orderly process that was not only standard but predictable and through which all societies needed to pass (see Davis, Latin American Thought, 99– 103). Only the carefully supervised maturation of mechanisms like democracy, technological knowledge, and industrialization would eventually provide the proper environment for individual freedom. This type of social determinism, which undermined the notion of individual will, is what Vasconcelos and his generation rejected most strongly. Vasconcelos proclaimed in ‘‘Gabino Barreda’’: [E]l positivismo creyó en una subordinación radical de lo psíquico a lo biológico, de lo mental a lo orgánico; que el albedrío se explicó como condicionado a sus antecedentes de una manera fatal, tanto como lo es la caída de los cuerpos según la ley de la atracción, sólo que misterioso en apariencia, porque desconocemos las razones múltiples del querer, los motivos que operan en lo que hoy se llamaría la subconsciencia . . . ¿Somos hijos legítimos de una tradición verdaderamente científica, o desventurados que sueñan desesperando de la verdad? . . . Estas dudas, hoy como siempre, imponen la necesidad de meditar los criterios del método. (102, 110) 118


[Positivism believed in the radical subordination of the psychic to the biological, of the mental to the organic. It believed that free will was explained as conditioned by its antecedents in a fatalist way, much as falling objects were explained by the law of gravity, except more mysterious in appearance because we are unaware of the multiple reasons for love and the motivations which operate in what we now call the subconscious . . . Are we the legitimate heirs of a truly scientific tradition or unfortunates who dream desperately of truth? These doubts, now as always, require meditation on the criteria of the method.]

Closed systems—whether Díaz’s or Comte’s—cannot account for all the variants of free will as completely as their proponents think they can, because any stated method is simply not large enough to encompass ‘‘subconsciencia’’—the individual human conscience which (twenty years later in La raza cósmica) Vasconcelos would call, with a nod to Henri Bergson, ‘‘espíritu’’ [spirit]. He lays out the requirements of his perfect society: ‘‘Se vivirá sin norma, en un estado en que todo cuanto nace del sentimiento es un acierto. En vez de reglas, inspiración constante’’ [Life will be lived without norms, in a state in which all that comes from sentiments will be correct. Instead of rules, there will be constant inspiration] (‘‘La raza cósmica,’’ 115). In Vasconcelos’s utopian fantasy the psyche will be fully liberated from the tyranny of method. Establishing the place of this newly liberated individuality in the community would be a lifelong pursuit for the ateneístas. A group of North American radical writers from this same period, the ‘‘Young Americans’’ (Waldo Frank, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, and Van Wyck Brooks, who originally converged around the magazine Seven Arts [1916–1917]), paralleled the Ateneo de la Juventud in their wish to define a national culture and in their preoccupation with the relationship of the individual to the community. The Young Americans, initially brought together by strong political beliefs like a staunch pacifism during World War I, by intellectual radicalism in the tradition of William Morris, and by a commitment to Emersonian transcendentalism, attempted to explain the characteristics of a national culture through what Brooks called ‘‘the search for a usable past.’’ Instead of seeing America as a brave, new, and independent land that needed to create its own new history separate from Europe’s, the Young Americans felt that a sense of continuous history was necessary for galvanizing a sense of community, even if that history were reclaimed or invented: history as a reflection of the present. This interest in usable JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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history is also a common thread between the Young Americans and the ateneístas. This universalizing impulse led Alfonso Reyes to find the root of mexicanidad in classical Western literature, especially in Virgil (Fuentes credits Reyes with teaching him that ‘‘Mexican literature was important because it was literature, not because it was Mexican’’ [Myself 19]), and Henríquez Ureña to reevaluate the colonial period, much as it led Brooks to nineteenth-century American popular culture. The search for the usable past ultimately led both groups to a deep interest in utopias. Mumford’s The Golden Day (1924) and The Story of Utopias (1961), Henríquez Ureña’s La utopía de América (1925), and Reyes’s ‘‘El presagio de América’’ (1920) are some of the most notable of their many works on this theme. Remarkably, the interest in the history of utopias is not in utopias per se but always in utopias’ relationship to the present, in how imaginative literature from the past, in presaging an ideal future, refers to the concrete here-and-now of today. The historical study of utopias was meant to give America a sense of validation. Utopias provided a sense of belonging to a continuous, universal culture, and they represented a fulfilled destiny: America had been foreseen in the mind of Europe long before it was discovered. Besides providing historical continuity, the search for the usable past, in the assessment of Casey Nelson Blake, is like ‘‘aesthetic experience . . . a means of transcending the boundaries of one’s own individual existence’’ through the process of finding a greater context for the self (Beloved Community, 296). Blake historicizes the disjunction between the community and the individual by suggesting that the culture of late Victorian age caused this malaise: the generation of the Young Americans, raised in the ‘‘feminine’’ bourgeois domestic culture of the period, felt betrayed by a masculine realm that dominated the public sphere and ‘‘divorced the pursuit of success from any moral meaning’’ (Beloved Community, 24).8 A similar assessment can be applied to the ateneístas.9 Whatever family psychodrama may have spurred this interest in the disjunction between the individual and the community, the attempt to bridge the disjunction set both the Young Americans and the ateneístas into a lifelong dialogue with the ideal and led them away from the temporal (Brooks’s The Malady of the Ideal, first published in 1913, bemoans modern life and its cults of personality as deadening forces in art and calls for a new collective and antibourgeois sensibility). Utopias, invented and reclaimed history, a politically aware neoclassicism, mystical antiempiricism: all are examples of ideal future, ideal history, 120


ideal identity, and ideal spirituality with which both the Young Americans and the ateneístas flirt at various points in their careers. To these writers the ideal is the realm where disorienting gaps of historical discontinuity and gaps between the self and the community do not exist. Precisely this infatuation with the ideal is what propitiated Vasconcelos’s failures. Although Vasconcelos was as much an ideal synthesist as his fellow ateneístas, his own relationship with the ideal starkly distinguishes him from them and from the Young Americans. While the others harbored ideal notions of how society could be shaped (like Waldo Frank’s calls for North American unity with its Latin American neighbors) or looked to the past for usable elements to establish the validity of the present, only Vasconcelos offered an actual utopia, in La raza cósmica and his educational writings. Furthermore, Vasconcelos had the unique chance to act on his utopianism and to try to put the ideal into practice. The ateneístas and the Young Americans were always on the margins of true political action, as intellectual gadflies; only Vasconcelos became an actual nation builder. While Reyes and Henríquez Ureña meditated upon utopia, Vasconcelos actually began its construction—more than once.10 Instead of a search for the usable past, his was a search for the usable future. The significant difference between the theorists of utopia and Vasconcelos the practititioner is that the creation of a specific utopia is by necessity an imperfect reflection of its ideal. The noumenal by definition can never be phenomenal, and earthly utopia will always fail to meet its ideal model. The utopia Vasconcelos offers in De Robinsón a Odiseo (and to a great extent carried out during his ministry) is thus a compromised utopia. His educational plan provides enough mystical and arcane knowledge to turn a student into a Platonic aristocrat, but it also offers the down-to-earth bourgeois values of his own Porfirian youth—hygiene, singing lessons, ‘‘atletismo,’’ and love of the madre patria [motherland].11 Since the only realistic way of transubstantiating the ideal into practice is by definition an incomplete version, I would argue that, for Vasconcelos, earthly failure becomes a vital part of the ideal. The model for Vasconcelos’s new schools, which he outlines in De Robinsón a Odiseo, is a perfect example of his pragmatized idealism, to coin an oxymoron that only begins to address the many contradictions of his work. The schools were to offer students a surrogate ideal family: they would have free meals, medical care, instruction in health and perJOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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sonal hygiene. Vasconcelos lays out the ideal family romance more explicitly. The role of the teacher is that of ideal mother: ‘‘cada maestra es una madre que, por estar libre del lazo fisiológico, aprecia mejor la realidad espiritual del educando’’ [each teacher is a mother who, by being free from physiological ties, better appreciates the spiritual reality of the pupil] (‘‘De Robinsón,’’ 47). This Platonic family would neither be weighted down by kinship nor be dirtied by psychosexual complications. Vasconcelos makes sure that his model is not confused with the pedagogical ideas coming from North America. For him, John Dewey’s ‘‘cold, Anglo-Saxon’’ system of education centers its educational effort on the student, who can be measured, tested, and graphed. Teaching becomes a mere statistical contingency in regard to the needs of the student. In Vasconcelos’s model the focus is on ideals and examples embodied by the teacher or, more specifically, by the teacher’s mind: ‘‘El eje de la escuela no puede ser otro que la conciencia del maestro’’ [The central focus of school can be no other than the conscience of the teacher] (‘‘De Robinsón,’’ 45).The government’s duty is to provide teachers who live up to official idealism and who can act as standardized role models. To meet this need, Vasconcelos’s machine distributed the eclectic magazine El Maestro (1921–1923) for free to his corps of volunteers: ‘‘Como este periódico se dirige a las multitudes, se repartirá gratuitamente. Pero, objetarán algunos, entonces nadie se interesará por adquirirlo, lo cual es como si dijésemos, cobremos un impuesto por el aire a fin de que la gente se interese por respirar. No, la verdadera luz no tiene precio’’ [Since this publication is meant for the masses, it is distributed free of cost. Some will raise the objection that since it is free, no one will care to obtain it, which is like saying we should impose a tax on air so people will be interested in breathing. No, true light has no price] (‘‘Una llamada cordial,’’ 7). El Maestro is the epitome of Vasconcelos’s compromised idealism. It is part mystical scripture (translations of Plotinus and Confucius), part middle-class fantasy (sections on impressionist art, avant-garde music, travel, ‘‘fisiocultura’’), and part useful technical manual (agriculture, small business, world and financial news). It would appear that Vasconcelos’s compromised idealism also included knowledge of the very impossibility of the pure ideal. According to De Robinsón a Odiseo and El Maestro, Vasconcelos’s teachers needed not be moral superiors or even intellectual exemplars (in ‘‘La raza cósmica’’ he decries the ‘‘microideología del especialista’’ [micro122


ideology of the specialist] [89]). Rather, they must teach through ‘‘entusiasmo’’ [enthusiasm] and, as it should happen in all familias decentes [decent families] through ‘‘amor’’ [love] (‘‘De Robinsón,’’ 46). Reyes wrote a precise summary of Vasconcelos’s educational philosophy: ‘‘educar es preparar improvisadores’’ [to educate is to prepare improvisers] (Obras, 2:299–300). If a teacher provides a strong model, the youth will improvise on it. The example must be at once inspiring and transparent: once the students become infected with the enthusiasm the teacher ‘‘procurará hacerse sentir lo menos posible’’ [will try to make himself or herself felt as little as possible], and the teacher’s shortcomings will become irrelevant (‘‘De Robinsón,’’ 46). The ideal head of this educational family as well as its ideal model of individualism was, naturally, Vasconcelos himself. His solution to the disjunction between the individual and the community that so vexed the ateneístas and the Young Americans consisted in identity construction as an act of will on both a small and large scale: Sylvia Molloy claims that the Vasconcelos of the Memorias ‘‘ ’muralizes’ himself,’’ presenting his own life as an oversized national epic, in the euphoric style of his muralist protégés (At Face Value, 189). In his work on education, the scale is even grander. Vasconcelos deliberately blurs the distinction between himself and the nation: he nationalizes himself. Possibly the most famous words Vasconcelos wrote are found in the motto he devised for the National University: ‘‘Por mi raza hablará el espíritu’’ [through my race the spirit shall speak]. (He recalls the thinking behind this motto in Memorias, 2:75.) In his later conservative years Vasconcelos jested that his words had been a veiled reference to the Holy Spirit, since ‘‘no hay otro espíritu válido que el Espíritu Santo’’ [there is no valid spirit other than the Holy Spirit] (En el ocaso de mi vida, xxii–xxiii). When referring to the collective raza, the motto uses the singular mi. It joins the adamantly individual to an indefinite, universal entity, ‘‘el espíritu.’’ There is a conflation of the universal with the singular and vice versa, in which the individual uttering the phrase speaks for the entire raza. Vasconcelos inscribes his biography on every illiterate campesino who enters his eclectic course of self-knowledge through education. The key to this literally self-aggrandizing attitude toward education lies in Vasconcelos’s own education on the border between the United States and Mexico. In Memorias he describes growing up in the remote towns to which his father, a customs agent, had been posted. His life in the hinterlands of northern Mexico meant a formation in the disJOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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tant periphery of a highly centralized national culture.Vasconcelos describes the frightening possibility of Indian raids: La región vastísima de arenas y serranías seguía dominada por los apaches, enemigo común de las dos castas blancas dominadoras: la hispánica y la anglosajona. Al consumar sus asaltos, los salvajes mataban a los hombres, vejaban a las mujeres; a los niños pequeños los estrellaban contra el suelo y a los mayorcitos los reservaban para la guerra . . . ‘‘Si llegan a venir—aleccionaba mi madre—, no te preocupes: a nosotros nos matarán, pero a ti te vestirán de gamuza y plumas, te darán tu caballo, te enseñarán a pelear y un día podrás liberarte.’’ (Memorias, 1:7–8) [The vast region of mountain ranges and sands was still dominated by the Apaches, common enemy to both dominating castes: the Hispanic and the Anglo-Saxon. When they carried out their attacks, these savages killed men and violated women. They smashed babies against the ground and older children they raised as warriors . . . ‘‘If they come,’’ my mother would lecture me, ‘‘do not worry. They will kill us, but they will dress you in skins and feathers, they will give you your horse, they will teach you how to fight, and someday you will free yourself.’’]

The young boy Vasconcelos is sent across the bridge to the American elementary school in Eagle Pass, Texas. He suffers numerous aggressions at the hands of schoolyard bullies and learns how to fight from another Mexican boy: ‘‘—Toma—me dijo, enseñándome una potente navaja—; te la presto. Estos gringos le tienen miedo al fierro’’ [‘‘Take this,’’ he said, showing me a powerful knife. ‘‘I’ll loan it to you. These gringos are afraid of steel’’] (Memorias, 1:33). The middle-class sense of Mexicanness he learns from his family during these ‘‘Wild West’’ years becomes something to be maintained privately, at home. ‘‘El afán de protegerme contra la absorción por parte de la cultura extraña acentuó en mis padres el propósito de familiarizarme con las cosas de mi nación’’ [The desire to protect me from assimilation into a foreign culture increased my parents’ intention of familiarizing me with the things of my nation] (Memorias, 1:42). This Mexican identity is always under threat from the Indian and from the Yankee, from the barbarian other. In the wilderness of the border Vasconcelos is forced to become the personal representative of his entire race and possibly its only survivor (‘‘a nosotros nos matarán, pero a ti’’ [they will kill us, but you]). For the young boy, a sense of na124


tion becomes an act of individual will, to be nourished in private and defended in public, a kind of hearth religion. This is how Vasconcelos resolves the disjunction between the individual and the community: a self-sufficient distance from the center is necessary for a solid sense of identity on any level.When two young boys, sons of a government functionary recently arrived from Mexico City, come into the young José’s classroom, these delicate creatures, with their sailor suits and citified manners, are promptly beaten up (Memorias, 1:40–41). The only way of avoiding a weak and flaccid sense of identity is to form that identity in the abstract, away from the apron-strings of the mother culture. The formation of cultural identity on the periphery is related to the emphasis that Vasconcelos, as educator, would eventually place on the book as both a symbol and a tool. Reading is defiantly personal; it requires an act of will. He writes about his reading life on the border: ‘‘Mi pasión de entonces era la lectura, y me poseía con avidez. Devoraba lo que en la escuela nos daban y cada año nos ampliaban el círculo de clásicos ingleses y norteamericanos. Leía por mi cuenta en la casa todos los libros hallados a mano . . . pensaba: ‘Ningún niño en los dos pueblos ha leído tanto como yo’ ’’ [My passion at that time was for reading, and I did it avidly. I devoured what was given to us at school, and every year we were given a larger list of British and North American classics. I read on my own every book I found at home . . . I thought, ‘‘No other boy in either town has read as much as I have’’] (Memorias, 1:41–42). Vasconcelos’s individuality and his defiant difference from both ‘‘pueblos’’ (Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, on the two sides of the border and by extension both in Mexico and in the United States) are measured by how much he has read, a lesson he will pass on to a generation of schoolchildren. In another essay Vasconcelos recalls his reading during his years abroad as a political refugee. Reading what he can whenever he can becomes one of the survival strategies of exile: [Este libro no es] sino una colección de notas sacadas de distintos autores, en distintas épocas, en las bibliotecas de las ciudades por donde me ha tocado ir pasando. Muchas veces he tomado un apunte a lápiz de algún libro importante que después ya no he podido volver a consultar, porque mis azares me llevaban lejos, y, desgraciadamente, muchas de las obras relativas sólo se encuentran en las más grandes bibliotecas. (Estudios indostánicos, 10–11)12 [(This book) is but a collection of notes taken from different authors, at different times, in the libraries of the cities where chance has taken me. I have JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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often taken pencil notes on some important book which I have not been able to consult subsequently, because fate took me elsewhere, and unfortunately many of the relevant works could be found only in the largest libraries.]

Defiant reading to define oneself is a continuation of his childhood on the frontier. Reading is the hearth religion of individualism. Vasconcelos would later state that books fell into two categories: ‘‘libros que leo sentado’’ [books I read sitting down] and ‘‘libros que leo de pie’’ [books I read standing up]. He favored the latter because, as he put it, ‘‘nos hacen levantar . . . [y] nos obliga [sic] a esforzarnos como para subir’’ [they raise us up . . . and they force us to exert ourselves, as if to climb] (‘‘Libros que leo,’’ 266–269). The emphasis on difficult and abstract works deliberately forces a student to become an autodidact. True knowledge, like true cultural identity, is hard to achieve and requires the grueling experience of learning in a vacuum: both education and identity must develop in exile at the frontiers of the mind, as salutary exercises of individual will. The main philosophical difference between Vasconcelos and the ateneístas (as well as the Young Americans) is that whereas they rely on continuities and uniformities, Vasconcelos relies on fissures and contradictions. Alfonso Reyes, in his particular search for the usable past, would write in his ‘‘Discurso por Virgilio’’ (1932) that the continuity of the pastoral sensibility and of the Latin language constitutes the ‘‘historia espiritual de una familia étnica’’ [spiritual history of an ethnic family] and that this tie extends to individuals: ‘‘esta inmersión en los vasos comunicantes de la subconsciencia, donde cada hombre es injerto de antepasados, y sin abdicar nuestra dignidad de individuos, todos nos sabemos atados en igual tronco’’ [in this immersion into the communicating vessels of the subconscious, where each man is a graft of his forebears and, without abdicating our individuality, we know ourselves to be growths of the same trunk] (Obras, 11:165). For Reyes, the disjunction between the self and the community is bridged by a heightened awareness of origin. Thus the study of continuities becomes necessary for a sense of community, for an awareness of the hidden affinities of the ‘‘familia étnica.’’ Contradiction, especially between stated ideals and practice, is a strong constant throughout Vasconcelos’s entire work. His inability to match reality with his ideals goes beyond the case of an overachiever whose standards are set impossibly high. Rather, Vasconcelos’s contradictions seem deliberate, and his work displays an ostentatious failure 126


to account for them. The most notorious example of this is in his protestations of Schopenhauerian disgust (asco) for all things physical, including sexual desire (in Vasconcelos’s racial utopia, procreation will become an act of ‘‘desinterés’’ [disinterest]). These protestations contrast startlingly with the unapologetic accounts of torrid extramarital affairs in Memorias. The list of contradictions between Vasconcelos’s stated positions and his own record of his actions continues: his stated ambivalence toward worldly things is at odds with his most sensual—and arguably best—pages describing the foods, smells, and sounds of the places he loved; his impassioned defense of the Indian and of racial miscegenation grates against his proposal for a pan-Hispanic culture that is essentially middle class, criollo, and white. The contradictions also extend to the very nature of his writings: the intimate confessions of fallibility in Memorias contrast starkly with the tone of oracular infallibility of La raza cósmica. As José Joaquín Blanco notes, the Memorias are a reverse prophecy—a record of how things happened, as opposed as to how they were to be (Se llamaba Vasconcelos, 175); we can easily read these memoirs as a borderline picaresque tale of things that did not work out. The marked contrast between the tone of infallible revelation in La raza cósmica and the Rousseau-like, unapologetic and biased acknowledgment of his own frailties and weaknesses in Memorias cannot be explained away as a simple generic incompatibility. The two modes exist simultaneously and on purpose: it is rarely noticed that in the original edition of La raza cósmica (1925) the now-famous prophetic essay is simply a preface to a more extensive section of travel-notes on a journey to South America that Vasconcelos made in 1924. This crónica de viaje is in fact an ‘‘outtake’’ of the Memorias—indeed there Vasconcelos writes ‘‘[l]os detalles de ese viaje no los repetiré’’ [I will not repeat the details of this trip] and refers the reader instead to La raza cósmica (Memorias, 2:130). The filiation cuts deep. One of the most haunting assertions in La raza cósmica is its almost apologetic statement that ‘‘[esto] no es un simple esfuerzo ideológico para levantar el ánimo de una raza deprimida’’ [(this) is not an ideological effort to raise the morale of a depressed race] (‘‘La raza cósmica,’’ 124), reminiscent of the disclaimer in Memorias that the book ‘‘contiene la experiencia de un hombre y no aspira a la ejemplaridad, sino al conocimiento’’ [contains the experience of one man and does not aspire to exemplarity, but rather to knowledge] (1:6). Both statements toy with patent falsehood, for reasons never really explained. JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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We can trace the origin of Vasconcelos’s contradictions to the failure of his own ideal model: the fall of President Francisco I. Madero, the ideal philosopher-king. Madero stands out in the often savage Memorias as the only unambiguous hero besides Vasconcelos himself. Even Madero’s weaknesses are characterized by Vasconcelos as strengths. Enrique Krauze notes that Vasconcelos’s infatuation with Madero—almost a fetishism—became a kind of repetition compulsion: after the fall of Madero, Vasconcelos would become the standard-bearer of maderismo and would forever try to repeat Madero (‘‘El caudillo Vasconcelos,’’ 42). Madero was the embodiment of everything Vasconcelos valued: pragmatic idealism in defiance of oppressive regimes, both political and positivist. Madero championed democracy—‘‘normas espirituales, cristianas y libres a lo Tolstoi’’ [free Christian spiritual norms à la Tolstoy]—and rejected the oppressive social evolutionism of the científicos, ‘‘con su doctrina de la supremacía de los fuertes’’ [with their doctrine of supremacy of the strongest] (Memorias, 1:389). Madero also valued a finely developed aesthetic sensibility, the highest attribute a philosopher-king could ever have. This meant, sub rosa, that Madero stood for an urbane criollo culture in contrast with the base rudeness of the general populace, ‘‘aquella plebe gallera y alcohólica’’ [the alcoholic and cock-fighting rabble] (Memorias, 1:389) which to Vasconcelos was the true evil of the country.13 Madero favored Pan-American Hispanism in opposition to Washington: ‘‘buscaba hacer patente nuestra solidaridad con la porción hispánica de América’’ [he wished to reaffirm our solidarity with the Hispanic part of America] (Memorias, 1:397). But most importantly, Madero stood for the end of the vicious cycles of history, while initiating a prideful awareness of the mestizo nature of the country: ‘‘Madero liquidaba el facundismo, la supremacía del bruto armado sobre el civilizado constructor . . . Sin incitar al indio contra el blanco, inició la tarea de despertar a la raza vencida; sin proclamarse de derecha o izquierda, estuvo siempre atento al mayor bien de los humildes’’ [Madero overcame facundismo, the supremacy of the armed barbarian over the civilized builder . . . Without inciting the Indian against the white, he initiated the task of awakening the vanquished race; without claiming allegiance to either right or left, he was always aware of the interests of the poorest] (Memorias, 1:433, 432). All of these values would find their way into the heart of La raza cósmica, into his role as educator, and into his presidential campaign of 1929. I would argue that Madero’s heroic example, including his failure, 128


becomes Vasconcelos’s ideal model. According to Vasconcelos, Madero’s downfall came about because Mexico was simply not ready for his brand of enlightenment. The traumatic center of Memorias, carefully echoing the last chapters of the Gospels in which Christ is betrayed, describes the death of Madero at the hands of traitors. When the treacherous rebellion began against Madero in 1913, Vasconcelos rushed to the aid of his president. He found Madero under siege in the presidential mansion. Vasconcelos and several of the original maderistas managed to enter the fortress a few days before Madero’s murder, during a lull in the fighting: El peligro nos volvía a juntar . . . [Madero] afirmó: . . .—Sobre ustedes los jóvenes caerá ahora la responsabilidad . . . [E]sto se resuelve en unos días, y en seguida reharemos el Gobierno; tenemos que triunfar porque representamos el bien. Pobre de México si llegara a imponerse toda esa canalla que nos amenaza. No, no puede ser. El bien tiene que triunfar. En el comedor de Palacio se servía una comida sencilla, pero bien aderezada. Un Barsac de las viejas reservas llenaba de oro verdoso la transparencia de las copas. La conversación del presidente era animosa; pero los ministros tenían aire lúgubre. (Memorias, 1:439–440) [Danger reunited us again . . . (Madero) said: . . . ‘‘Now, the responsibility will fall upon you, the young . . . (T)his will end in a few days, and soon we will rebuild the Government. We must triumph because we represent the good. Poor Mexico, if all the rabble which threatens us were to come to power. No, it must not be so. Good must triumph.’’] [A simple but well-appointed meal was served in the dining room of the Palace. Barsac of the old reserves filled the transparency of the glasses with a greenish gold. The president’s conversation was animated; ours had a funereal air.]

It is Madero’s last supper, and he has presented his disciples with his Eucharist and Last Command. Yet Vasconcelos is left somewhat mystified by Madero’s happy resignation or willful ignorance (he cannot decide which), in which the president turns what is obviously a sacrificial supper into a festive occasion: the blood-red wine of the sacrament is turned into a sparkling French white, and there is sincere talk of triumph. Vasconcelos muses about the reasons for Madero’s blindness JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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about the carnage going on outside, which will soon claim the president himself. ‘‘Y Madero no ve,’’ exclamaron todos. O no vio a tiempo o creyó más oportuno contemporizar, entregándose a lo irremediable . . . Lo más probable es que el destino, al consumar sus fines tortuosos, ciega a los más lúcidos en el instante en que va a destruirlos. Sobreviene una especie de parálisis la víspera de las derrotas injustas, pero inevitables. La maldición que pesa sobre nuestra patria oscureció la mente del más despejado de sus hijos. Entorpeció la acción del más ágil de sus héroes. A Madero lo envolvió la sombra. ¿Qué gran destino ignora estos eclipses? De la penumbra saldría él limpio y glorioso, cometa rutilante de la historia patria. Pero la nación caería en abismos que todavía no sobrepasa. (Memorias, 1:440–441) [‘‘Madero does not see,’’ everyone exclaimed. Or he didn’t see soon enough or thought it more prudent to live in the moment, handing himself over to hopelessness . . . It is most likely that destiny, in meeting its tortuous ends, blinds those who are most lucid in the instant it is about to destroy them. On the eve of unjust but inevitable defeats, a kind of paralysis overcomes one. The curse which hangs over our country darkened the mind of the clearest of its sons. It clumsied the most agile acts of its heroes. Madero was shrouded in shadow. What kind of destiny ignores these eclipses? From the darkness he would emerge clean and glorious, sparkling comet of national history. But the nation would fall into depths from which it has still not arisen.]

Of the few short stories Vasconcelos wrote, perhaps the best known is the Quiroga-esque ‘‘El fusilado.’’ Like Esteban Echeverría’s ferocious Romantic tale ‘‘El matadero,’’ it tells of the brutal execution of a righteous man and is the story of how to die well at the hands of the mob. Vasconcelos was deeply influenced by Madero’s stoic act—or rather by his failure to act in order to save himself. Madero’s hopeful last command, ‘‘en seguida reharemos el Gobierno’’ [soon we will rebuild the Government], is poignantly misguided; Madero’s resurrection would not come, and the country would be plunged into years of civil war, only to return to another cycle of strongmen (whom Vasconcelos would serve, although he would remain critical of them for failing to repeat maderismo). Madero’s command is so misguided that its very wrongness must be somehow significant. Vasconcelos’s observation that ‘‘el destino, al consumar sus fines tortuosos, ciega a los más lúcidos en el

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instante en que va a destruirlos’’ [destiny, in meeting its tortuous ends, blinds those who are most lucid in the instant it is about to destroy them] would become more than an observation; it would become a virtual requirement for remaining one of the chosen (‘‘los más lúcidos’’): the hero must fail at his most crucial moment. The ideal model Vasconcelos would forever try to emulate would be the Madero who failed, the Madero who sacrificed himself in willful blindness. Vasconcelos justifies Madero’s crucial sacrifice by speculating that someday it would prove to be useful. Someday Madero’s failure would be vindicated by history (‘‘saldría él limpio y glorioso, cometa rutilante de la historia patria’’ [he would emerge clean and glorious, sparkling comet of national history] [1:441]). Madero’s brand of goodness would only highlight the corruption of the world that could not abide him. Like Jesus or Socrates, he is not of this world—or the world is not ready for him. But Madero leaves his followers with a difficult envoi: ‘‘tenemos que triunfar porque representamos el bien’’ [we must triumph because we represent the good] (1:440). This command to be exemplary is imbedded in a paradox. The chosen must represent the good: ‘‘representamos,’’ not ‘‘imponemos’’ [impose] or ‘‘hacemos’’ [do] or even ‘‘defendemos’’ [defend]. The chosen must stand for the good, exemplifying it in themselves, even at the expense of achieving it. The message seems to be that being exemplar of the good is more valuable than making sure the good comes to pass. The paradox goes deeper: the representatives of the ideal like Madero, if necessary, must live delusionally. ‘‘Tenemos que triunfar’’ [we must triumph] becomes a cruel hoax that will plunge the country into a decade of bloodshed. The very failure of his ideal model becomes an integral part of its exemplarity in Vasconcelos’s eyes. Vasconcelos takes the command to represent the good, and to follow the example of the leader, as a command to fail. Vasconcelos’s disastrous run for the presidency in 1928–1929, chronicled in detail by John Skirius, is clearly an attempt to replicate Madero’s righteous end to the cycle of tyranny. Vasconcelos deliberately casts his campaign as a messianic return, often invoking the fallen president. The writer Andrés Henestrosa, then a young student leader and ‘‘parte del Estado Mayor’’ of Vasconcelos’s campaign, recalls the crucial moment when Vasconcelos gathered his advisors in a ‘‘consejo familiar’’ [family council] in Mazatlán to plan the final shift from campaign to armed insurrection:

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Vasconcelos decidió que el levantamiento fuera . . . el viernes 17 de noviembre . . . Los hombres que reclamaba Vasconcelos para rebelarse, en número de cuarenta, estaban puestos. Los encabezaba el general cristero Busquet . . . Sin embargo, el movimiento armado, anunciado durante un año, no se produjo: en un instante se redujo a nada. Cuando pregunté la razón, Vasconcelos respondió que después de haberme dormido, la noche del jueves a viernes, cambiaron los planes. ¿La causa? Nunca la manifestó el candidato. Muchas conjeturas se han ofrecido al respecto. Yo tengo la mía . . . [A Vasconcelos] audacia, valor no le faltaban. Con la muerte, había jugado y la había burlado . . . Para él, pues, ya era hora, dijo al repetir a Martí, a quien apenas si había leído. Así razonó el paso que iba a dar. Moriré, como Martí, en una oscura emboscada . . . ¿Por qué, pues, no se levantó en armas? No era su hora, como lo supuso. (Divagario, 223–224) [Vasconcelos decided that the rebellion would be . . . on Friday, the 17th of November . . . The men whom Vasconcelos counted on to rebel, forty in number, were all ready. They were led by the cristero general Busquet . . . However, the armed uprising, which had been announced for a year, never happened: in an instant it was reduced to nothing. When I asked Vasconcelos the reason why, he answered that after I had gone to sleep, the night of Thursday to Friday, plans changed. The reason? The candidate never gave it. Many speculations have been offered on the subject. I have mine: Vasconcelos . . . did not lack audacity or courage. He had cheated death and won. For him, the hour had come, he said, repeating Martí (whom he had barely read). That is how he explained the step he was about to take. I will die like Martí, in a dark ambush. So why didn’t he rise in arms? Because his hour had not come, as he had supposed.]

This is Vasconcelos’s self-conscious version of Madero’s last supper with the maderistas sixteen years earlier, when Madero unwittingly courts his own death by announcing his commitment to his ideals. But Vasconcelos’s version of the Passion of Madero fails doubly: he fails to martyr himself properly, for he survives, and thus fails to replace or even join Madero as the ultimate ideal model. While this failure in Mazatlán is clearly a symptom of his struggles with the ideal, it also points to his particular version of the ideal: the ideal always includes its own failure. I would argue that the failure of his bid for the presidency, far from being the single conversional fall in his life as Krauze would see it, is simply the grandest-scale version of something that had become a virtual requirement in each of his projects: all of Vasconce132


los’s stances contain their own undoing, and each of his idealizations contains its counterideal.14 Blanco explains the failure of Vasconcelos’s entire campaign along similar lines. He argues that rather than compromise his lofty messianism Vasconcelos refused to take the necessary steps of allying himself with other powerful cadres in the opposition. Vasconcelos refused support from the cristeros, the Catholic resistance fighters who were resisting the anticlerical crackdown by Plutarco Elías Calles; from the old Obregonistas and Zapatistas who felt betrayed; and from the restless student left wing. He appeared to court political martyrdom. His campaign became a cruel parody of ritual sacrifice, with others being killed in his name during bloody reprisals. Blanco believes that Vasconcelos cynically maintained his ‘‘integrity’’ at the expense of his supporters and perhaps the presidency (Se llamaba Vasconcelos, 149–158). Unlike either of these writers, I see Vasconcelos’s failure as part of an ingrained and ineluctable pattern. Christopher Domínguez Michael makes a similar case, if in a different register, focusing on theological implications and arguing that Vasconcelos was a committed heretic on a path that would become circular and return him to Catholicism, but only after ‘‘heresying’’ detours into philosophy, politics, and nationbuilding (Tiros, 47–157). Like a chemical mixture of agent with reagent, the volatile combination of an idea and its own undermining can only exist in a carefully controlled environment. The mastery of this unstable environment is Vasconcelos’s particular gift. As many critics have noted, Vasconcelos can be a self-aggrandizing performer: José Joaquín Blanco claims that his personal motto, taken from Romain Rolland, was ‘‘actuar en grande’’ [act grandly] (Se llamaba Vasconcelos, 22). Yet, oddly, his performances and narratives always involve not only untenability but also the awareness of this untenability.15 The real difference between Madero and Vasconcelos is one of consciousness. Vasconcelos’s presidential campaign was for nearly a year clearly headed toward his martyrdom. During what should have been the Maundy Thursday before his own crucifixion, Vasconcelos chose instead not to transcend, stating simply ‘‘cambiaron los planes’’ [the plans changed], without explaining why (Henestrosa, Divagario, 223). Vasconcelos, unlike Madero, can never unwittingly choose death, because he is too witting, too weighted down by the knowledge of what should happen; Madero’s blindness is not an option. Vasconcelos certainly tried to become an exemplar for the good, as Madero commanded, but his performance borders on JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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self-parody: ‘‘Yo no sé qué estoy haciendo aquí. ¡Mi reino no es de este mundo!’’ [I know not what I am doing here. My kingdom is not of this world!] he sighs dramatically to his secretary during his campaign (Taracena, José Vasconcelos, 84). His self-conscious attempt to repeat Madero’s messianism blurs the line between bathos and pathos, between the sublime and the ridiculous. It is precisely this sort of giddy instability that makes La raza cósmica Vasconcelos’s most haunting work. It is full of the symbolic symmetries and cryptic irrationalities of a sacred text of revelation. But the possibility that it is all a hoax lurks beneath its surface. Listeners, like the audience of a revival meeting, are asked to suspend their disbelief and simply to witness the marvels.Vasconcelos rarely cites sources for his arguments; and whenever he does refer to authorities, they are often embarrassingly patent quackery. At various points in the essay he refers to theosophist theories about Atlantis, quasi-scientific notions about hydroelectricity as the energy source of the future, crude racial stereotypes, as well as poorly overheard concepts from sociology, geology, and pop psychology. In one of the most startling moments in the essay, Vasconcelos (or the prophetic narrator of this set piece) pauses in the midst of a torrent of prophetic language describing why South America is to be the promised land for the new age to give an incongruously banal reason for this choice: because the waterfalls of Iguazú can be tapped for infinite hydroelectric power. In another section the narrator is about to fall into measured argumentation, but he catches himself and catapults into arbitrary syllogisms: there is a careful discussion of the numerological implications of the racial theory set forth; three (the historical ages) plus five (the archetypal world races) equals eight, a number that must therefore be significant in its own right. So the number eight is dubbed the magical ‘‘símbolo numérico de la igualdad’’ [number symbolizing equality]. Then the narrator uses this argument to ‘‘prove’’ his main claim: such a perfect symmetry can only be further evidence that the Fifth Age is coming. The narrator makes up his own rules and then assumes them to be true: ‘‘mi filosofía es lo contrario de analizar, lo contrario de disociar, lo contrario aun de discutir’’ [my philosophy is the opposite of analyzing, the opposite of dissociating, even the opposite of discussing] he later wrote cryptically (quoted in Fernández MacGregor, ‘‘Introducción,’’ xxiii). True to its neoplatonic idealism—and to Madero’s fiat—the strange rhetorical mode of the essay is meant to teach by example, not by evidence. The essay is more euphoric and startling than it is convincing 134


(Reyes once declared it ‘‘unreadable,’’ and Henríquez Ureña accused Vasconcelos of writing books that sold only because he had been a minister [Vasconcelos, Memorias, 2:143]). The exuberance of the essay is not simply the case of an overexcited preacher ordering the incredulous to believe. Rather, the exuberance reflects the extent to which the narrator himself believes. Instead of being an exhortation, it is a demonstration. It transcends from simple statement that can be either true or false into action, from the constative to the performative, in the terminology of J. L. Austin. This rhetorical strategy is magnified exuscitatio, the tactic of moving hearers to a like feeling or, in Vasconcelos’s own vocabulary, ‘‘entusiasmo.’’ It is a performance—or, more aptly, the Spanish representación—of someone in the process of convincing himself in spite of the obvious. Vasconcelos was fond of paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer’s expansive dictum that the world was his will and representation, but this imperative coexists with the last commandment of the sacrificed Madero about the duty to represent good, however unlikely (‘‘tenemos que triunfar porque representamos el bien’’ [we must triumph because we represent the good] [Memorias, 1:440; my emphasis]). The voice of the essay asserts that—by taking a counterintuitive leap of faith—the fictional, the merely representational, will become truth; and this act of unlikely self-conviction dares each of his listeners to take a similarly reckless leap. The unstable coexistence of contradictory impulses echoes again in the larger structure of La raza cósmica. As noted, it is often forgotten that the prophetic essay is only the first part of a larger book. The second and longer part consists of a crónica de viaje of an official trip to South America in 1922, written in the same engaging style as Memorias. A telling synergy arises between the two parts of the oddly juxtaposed text. In the first part of the book Vasconcelos places the location of the mystical age to come in South America, specifically in its jungles and waterfalls, which can provide infinite raw material and energy for the new society. In the travel-narrative portion of the book Vasconcelos describes an actual visit with the young poets Carlos Pellicer and Julio Torri to the waterfalls of Iguazú, which Vasconcelos names specifically in the earlier prophetic section as the flashpoint of the new age: Vamos, pues, como sonámbulos en un mundo de fantasía. Sólo afirmando la pisada en el suelo nos convencemos de que aquello es real, y una de las realidades más sublimes que hayan producido las fuerzas del Cosmos . . . Después de todo, se dice uno a sí mismo, pensando en la posibilidad de la caída junto JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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con las aguas, sería una muerte como cualquier otra, de donde el alma saldría danzando, enlazada a los destellos de las ninfas; pero el cuerpo vacila y tiembla, se siente débil, se sabe impotente para defender su minuto, en medio de la eternidad y la indiferencia de la creación. Es preciso detener la fantasía, descansar unos instantes, no pensar en nada, para volver a mirar el prodigio, para aclarar sus contornos, para inquirir en sus ritmos, para impregnarse de sus melodías . . . Pellicer se acerca tanto a la orilla del abismo que nos causa escalofríos; lo reñimos, pero no responde. Está ido, pertenece al espectáculo. (La raza cósmica, 213, 219–220) [We go, then, like sleepwalkers in a fantasy world. Only through our steps on solid ground are we assured that that is real, and one of the most sublime realities ever produced by the forces of the Cosmos . . . After all, one says to oneself upon thinking of the possibility of falling with the waters, it would be a death like any other. The soul would emerge dancing, wrapped in the splendors of the water nymphs. But the body hesitates, trembles, feels weak. It feels impotent to defend its minute in the middle of eternity, and creation’s indifference. We must stop the fantasy, rest a moment, and think of nothing, to be able to witness more the marvel once again, to discern its contours and inquire into its rhythms, and to become suffused with its melodies . . . Pellicer comes so close to the edge of the abyss that it sends shivers up our spines. We argue with him, but he doesn’t respond. He is absent, belonging to the spectacle.]

Reaching the edge of the abyss, overcome by nature and by possibility, the narrator enters a mystical state of reverie in which death would be a welcome release into a belle époque paradise of water nymphs. Appropriately, at the precise moment of transcendence, the body fails—it feels impotent to ‘‘defender su minuto’’ [defend its minute] (just as Madero was impotent to defend his). Then, suddenly, in the midst of what should be the definitive failure of the earthly body and the moment of sublimation into the ether (the leap of faith, ‘‘tenemos que triunfar’’ [we must triumph], which Madero requires), another, more humble failure interrupts the reverie as well as the leap. There is a return to one’s senses, followed by a moment of great lucidity: ‘‘descansar unos instantes, no pensar en nada . . . para aclarar sus contornos, para inquirir en sus ritmos’’ [rest a moment, and think of nothing . . . to discern its contours and inquire into its rhythms, and to become suffused with its melodies]. 136


What does the narrator see in this moment of lucidity when sight returns? Nothing, if not the figure of the mystical poet stepping toward the abyss and in a deluded state of reverie, about to walk into thin air, or at least to make a fool of himself by thinking he could. In other words, he sees himself. When one has been granted such clarity, it is an astonishing revelation to see such a vision of oneself: a poor unfortunate about to jump off the cliff while chasing nymphs, much as he was about to do a few seconds ago. From this experience the physically restrained poet Pellicer wrote some rather unrestrained modernista verses (‘‘Iguazú’’ [1922]) and dedicated them to Vasconcelos: El agua del Iguazú se derrumba a grandes gritos o cae en simple melodía; numera el infinito igual en una cuerda que en locas griterías. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [Iguazú] Está cañoneando el abismo con su artillería sin tregua. . . . . . . . . . . El río da cincuenta saltos y en cada salto tiene una voz diversa. Iguazú, Iguazú, Iguazú, Iguazú. (263) [The water of Iguazú collapses in great shouts or falls in simple melody; it numbers the infinite at once on the string of an instrument and in mad shouting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Without truce, [Iguazú] is cannonading the abyss with its artillery. . . . . . . The river takes fifty leaps and at each has a different voice. Iguazú, Iguazú, Iguazú, Iguazú.]

The danger of pathos is that it can become bathos; the sublime is only a step away from the embarrassing. When the narrator of La raza cósmica stops himself at the edge of the abyss, the moment of clarity is turned inward; and the narrator witnesses what can happen if the flight into the sublime, ‘‘[al] medio de la eternidad’’ [in the midst of eternity] JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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(La raza cósmica, 219–220), does not happen—a literal and deadly fall at worst, social dissonance at best. Vasconcelos’s knowledge casts doubt on the very possibility of the sublime: when the moment of sublimation is seen in a different light, it looks like so much shouting, swooning, and unintentionally humorous poetry. With regard to the failures of the sublime and in their resulting flashes of clarity, recall Paul de Man’s use of Baudelaire’s dédoublement to describe a sudden escape from one’s conception of oneself. One laughs with relief after tripping because there is a ‘‘vertige, a dizziness’’ as a result of sudden objectification (Blindness, 215). This happens with any unexpected fall into self-consciousness—when one realizes that one’s dancing motions are artificial and contrived or when one catches one’s image in a mirror. This act of consciousness is sudden and uncomfortable and forces a rereading of oneself, a self-correction, and ultimately a return to context and composure (Blindness, 214–216). In light of this analysis, we can refine the earlier formulation that for Vasconcelos the emphasis on reading is an exercise in self-creation through individual will. The readings that fill the life and work of Vasconcelos are actually willful misreadings or incomplete readings: the young Vasconcelos reading eclectically and without method or context in his desolate surroundings; La raza cósmica’s deliberately jarring reading of such random sources as positivist theories about race, theosophist notions of cosmic energy, and popular paranoia toward the Yankee; the candidate Vasconcelos’s misreading of Madero’s model of martyrdom and of his political opposition. Each of these is the product of reading in a vacuum. The moment of willful self-creation occurs in the humble acknowledgment of these misreadings or at least in acknowledging the limits of that self-imposed vacuum. The final exercise of the will, then, and the construction of identity lie in the ability to come close to the edge of what one had truly wanted to believe was transcendence, to pull back at the last moment and to realize that it was simply a long way down. The realization of what could have happened if one had not stopped in time can be almost cruelly comic: a generation of hungry peasants quoting Plotinus and the Bhagavad-Gita, a eugenically pure utopia in the Amazonian jungle enforcing a middle-class appreciation of music and manners, and a messiah who gives up after the faithful have gone to bed. The proposals seem to carry built-in defenses against their own excesses, warning about what would happen if they came to pass fully. Of course, one can prop up a school as an alternative family and provide its students with 138


role models, free meals, and ‘‘love’’; but the state school can never replace the real thing. In one of the more touching moments in the early parts of Memorias Vasconcelos tells of his very first failure—surprisingly enough, in a school oratory contest: De pantalón corto y con unos pliegos en la mano, marché con el cortejo oficial, junto con mi padre, sintiéndome importante. Me parecí a obvio que al llegar a la edad de los que me rodeaban, los sobrepasaría a todos desmesuradamente. Por lo pronto, y aun como niño, era yo cosa aparte . . . Se adelantó al barandal un orador de levita negra y bigotes, ademán de arenga, y llovieron nombres de héroes invictos con mucha libertad e independencia, gloria y loor, loor . . . [Después] comencé con desgano la lectura. Mi voz escasa y opaca estaba contra mí. Una exagerada timidez para lo externo volvía encogidos mis movimientos y contrastaba penosamente con mi convicción interna acerca del valor de mi pieza escrita. El público atribuyó mi atrojamiento al temor que causa enfrentársele. En realidad, no me preocupaba el público, sino que gradualmente, al leer mi composición, perdía interés en ella, le encontraba defectos y mentalmente corregía. Me daban ganas de decir: Esto no está bien y hay que hacerlo de nuevo. Pero seguía leyendo de cualquier modo y con prisa de concluir, y como nadie oía, comenzaron los siseos . . . Lo cierto es que pasé mi rato de agonía. Los demás se olvidaron pronto de mí pero yo seguía rumiando mi fracaso. La claridad de la tarde de fiesta se me llenó de humosidad gris. Mi padre estaba irritado. Sólo mi madre, horas después, me dio la solución consoladora: ‘‘No eres tú para la oratoria: serás escritor, y vale más.’’ (Memorias, 1:53–54) [In short pants and with some pages in hand, I marched together with my father and the official entourage, feeling myself important. It seemed obvious that when I arrived at the age of those around me, I would surpass them markedly. Meanwhile, still as a child, I was a thing apart . . . An orator with black frock-coat, moustache, and a speechifying demeanor, came to the railing, and upon us rained the names of unvanquished heroes, liberty and independence, and praise, praise . . . I began my lecture fearlessly. My scant and opaque voice worked against me. A strange shyness toward the external began to shrink my movements, all of which contrasted sharply with my internal conviction as to the value of my written speech . . . The audience attributed my awkwardness to fear of facing the public. In reality I was not at all worried about the public, but rather as I read I gradually lost interest in my composition, as I found flaws in it and corrected them mentally. I felt like JOSÉ VASCONCELOS AND THE NECESSITIES OF FAILURE

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saying: this is wrong and needs to be redone. But I continued reading somehow, to finish quickly, and as no one was listening, the hissing began . . . What is certain is that I passed my moment of agony. The others soon forgot about me, but I kept mulling over my failure. The clarity of that holiday afternoon filled me with a gray cloudiness. My father was irritated. Only my mother, hours later, gave me a consoling solution: ‘‘You are not meant for oratory: you will be a writer, which is more valuable.’’]

The triumphs of the exemplary, frock-coated speaker who precedes Vasconcelos are only partial triumphs—as was the triumph of Madero (or Benito Juárez, another secular saint of modern Mexico). When the young boy realizes this paradox, it becomes impossible for him to yield to such a compromised triumph. He becomes otherworldly, loses interest, and begins to block out the crowd, to read out loud in a vacuum, like the poet at the edge of the void. When the hissing begins, he becomes self-aware, but at a price. Upon close scrutiny of Vasconcelos’s embrace of failure, the picture that comes into focus is similar to the one de Man sees in Yeats: ‘‘Those who look to Yeats for reassurance from the anxieties of our own post-romantic predicament . . . will not find it . . . He cautions instead against the danger of unwarranted hopeful solutions’’ (Rhetoric, 238). The command of failure is not an easy skill since it comes at a high price; but like any skill it can be learned and mastered. Failure can become an invaluable tool and a painful warning, both to would-be poets of the mystical sublime and to would-be builders of national utopias.

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PART 4

At the Limits THE 1960S AND THE BORDER


CHAPTER 5

The Threats of Collapse in Cambio de piel (or Fuentes the Frail)

This boy, at once so powerful and so weak . . . The present volume is intended as a modest monument, a broken column, to commemorate [his] life. —HONORÉ DE BALZAC, LOUIS LAMBERT (170, 184)

BORBORYGMUS—Rumbling or gurgling noises produced by the movement of gas, fluid or both in the alimentary canal, and audible at a distance. —STEDMAN’S CONCISE MEDICAL DICTIONARY (3RD ED.)

By all accounts Carlos Fuentes is a monument of Mexican letters, and indeed this grandiosity has become an integral and deliberate part of an aesthetic agenda of monumentality: his Balzacian ‘‘La edad del tiempo’’ [The Age of Time], which encompasses virtually his entire novelistic work, seeks to represent nothing less than all of history. As many observers have remarked, some admiringly and some quite critically, the ‘‘afán totalizante’’ [totalizing eagerness] of his work speaks volumes about his personal ambitions. A good place to explore this ‘‘totalizing eagerness’’ is his 1967 novel Cambio de piel, which the Mexican novelist Gustavo Sainz praised at the time as ‘‘el más alto monumento literario de la historia de México’’ [the highest literary monument in the history of Mexico] (quoted in Volpi, La imaginación, 66). Indeed, when this work appeared it represented an attempt to change the scope of Mexican letters. It was certainly bigger than anything Fuentes had tried before and marked an ambitious departure from his inward-looking narratives of the previous decades. Cambio de piel lays out a mythology that engages with the notion of origins and its consequences as well as with the systems of belief that arise from an awareness of those origins. It is heavy with the language of violent renewal (hence the title) and full of references to Aztec rituals of sacrifice and renovation as well as to the Holocaust. This heavy subject matter is leavened with a cloying

awareness of popular culture, a playful and highly ornate prose, repetitive and allusive. The frame narrative takes place in April 1965, on Palm Sunday: we see a group traveling on holiday by car from Mexico City to Veracruz. The group’s car breaks down in the ancient city of Cholula, an important religious site since pre-Hispanic times and also the site of Hernán Cortés’s massacre of 1519. The main character, Javier, is a middle-aged bureaucrat and failed writer who has been struggling for years to finish his grand opus, Pandora’s Box, and is now trapped in a deadening job. He is married to Elizabeth, an American Jew whom he met while studying in New York before the war. They are accompanied on their trip by Isabel, a young and liberated upper-class Mexican girl who is a student of Javier’s, and Franz, a Sudeten German who hides a Nazi past. The two couples have been engaged in some bedhopping, and the story line plays with the various symmetries thereof. The narrator, Freddy Lambert, is a questionably omniscient figure who appears to be privy to the foursome’s innermost thoughts and histories and has apparently been intimate with both female characters. He is currently stalking the foursome along with a ragtag group of international hipsters, possibly a rock band, called the Monks. Freddy writes his story from a mental institution, addressing his prose primarily to the two women but mostly to Elizabeth. In his account of the prehistories of each of the characters and of the setting, Freddy takes narrative excursions to Hernán Cortés’s massacre of the Cholulans in 1519, Argentina, the Greek island of Falaraki, prewar New York and Prague, and the Nazi death camp at Terezin. Toward the end of the story the Monks stage a mock trial for the travelers, acting out the parts of Javier, Elizabeth, and the others to humorous effect. In the process they accuse Javier of weakness but ultimately condemn Franz to death for his war crimes, for it appears that Franz was the chief architect of Terezin. Late that night the four travelers, on a dare, enter the tunnels that honeycomb the Pre-Columbian pyramid of Cholula, the largest pyramid in the world. From the outside the pyramid resembles a mountain topped by a Catholic church, and in Fuentes’s fiction it becomes an ominous metaphor for the overlapping structures that pervade the novel: a Catholic sanctuary on top of a preColumbian place of immolation, joined by a common function of renovation through sacrifice—hence the title of the novel. (Fuentes, like Paz, was influenced by Mircea Eliade’s and Jacques Soustelle’s studies of ritual.) The Monks follow the travelers into the tunnels of the pyra144

AT THE LIMITS: THE 1960S AND THE BORDER

mid/mountain, intending the ritual execution of Franz. When they are deep in the bowels of this heavy metaphor, the Monks break into a British-Invasion dies irae (‘‘The day of wrath / that day has come . . . Man! What a Terror! / Man! When the judge shall come! . . . Gonna be no get-away!’’ [374–375]). There is an apocalyptic earthquake, and the entire pyramid tumbles down on top of the group. This dynamic of ritual instability and impending collapse may be considered in terms of Latin American theories of the Neobaroque and especially the version laid out by Fuentes’s contemporary, the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy. The filiations between the Fuentes of the 1960s and Sarduy’s Neobaroque as it evolves from the late 1960s to the mid1980s warrant a brief summary. Perhaps the strongest point of contact is Fuentes’s 1969 book La nueva novela hispanoamericana, which served as a sort of manifesto for the Latin American ‘‘Boom’’ generation, in which Fuentes proclaims: ‘‘el nuevo escritor latinoamericano emprende una revisión a partir de una evidencia: la falta de un lenguaje . . . Inventar un lenguaje es decir todo lo que la historia ha callado’’ [the new Latin American writer embarks upon a revision based on a piece of evidence: the lack of language . . . Inventing a language consists of saying everything that history has not said] (30). This insistence on renovation, what Julio Ortega has termed the ‘‘poetics of change,’’ shares a fundamental kinship to what Sarduy calls ‘‘la nueva inestabilidad’’ [the new instability]. The renovating ethos of all the Boom writers and their various aesthetic programs (from the magical realism of García Márquez, to Julio Cortázar’s cameralist techniques, to Fuentes’s mythologizing pop-novels) are allied to Sarduy’s vision of the Neobaroque as a rejuvenating if destabilizing force. In various journal pieces and collections of essays like Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1969), Barroco (1974), ‘‘Barroco y el neobarroco’’ (1972), and La nueva inestabilidad (1987), Sarduy lays out the complicated poetics of this mode. He sees a clear connection between the historical aesthetics of the Baroque and the contemporary Latin American sensibility (he offers several examples from Fuentes’s work). Sarduy reduces the Baroque and its modern ‘‘Neobaroque’’ analogue to a series of operative dynamics, some of which are central to his own fiction: horror vacui, simulacra, the world-as-stage, dressing in drag, ‘‘chromatism,’’ tattooing, ellipsis, play of mirrors, and eroticism, all held together by what he considers the primary category of the Baroque, ornament (or ‘‘artificio’’). Here I will focus on one of Sarduy’s operative dynamics of the Baroque: juxtaposition. THE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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Juxtaposition is, of course, a huge category and could be applied to just about all symbolic and representative acts. But for Sarduy Baroque juxtaposition is of a very specific kind, a palimpsest that invites a ‘‘lectura en filigrana’’ [reading in filigree] (‘‘Barroco y el neobarroco,’’ 176), a process that changes the nature of its constituent parts. This particular characteristic of the Baroque is what has made it attractive to other Latin American exponents of the topic, including Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Octavio Paz, José Lezama Lima, and Alejo Carpentier. These writers are drawn to what they see as a key juxtaposition at the heart of the Baroque: America and Europe, the ‘‘Old’’ and ‘‘New’’ Worlds. According to these thinkers, the European Baroque’s garish and decorative excesses, crucifixions, dead saints, orgasmic Virgins, and explosions of gold leaf and asymmetrical curlicues as well as its mixture of the macabre and the erotic find a clean segue into (some claim are a result of) the American aesthetics of the indigenous cultures and African slaves. Plumed snakes, jaguar heads, and tribal symbols carved from jade and tropical woods flow seamlessly into fanciful European gargoyles and acanthus leaves crafted from granite and gilt. As writers like Lezama and Carpentier argue, this segue is possible because both modes exist in a similar key of ornamentation and stylization. This argument for aesthetic mestizaje is ultimately also an argument in favor of the Baroque as a mode of resistance: the Baroque is a space where the Americas come into their own on a footing at least equal to that of their European sources. (Lezama writes that the works of the Baroque architect Antonio Francisco de Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, a Brazilian mulatto, ‘‘son chispas de la rebelión’’ [are sparks of the rebellion] [La expresión, 106]). If Baroque juxtaposition changes the nature of both its sources, this means that—just as the Aztec universe was shaken by the Conquest—the European universe was changed by the Aztec and Quechua workers who incorporated their designs into the new cathedrals. Ultimately the effect was wide-ranging, as these surreptitious changes worked their way back to Europe. As Cesar Salgado summarizes it, ‘‘in the end, the New World baroque theory is a poetic appeal for restitution. Neobaroque theorists remind us that European culture after the Renaissance was the direct result of Western expansionism into the Americas . . . The neobaroque reversal makes it clear that both the material and symbolic flow of the baroque moved as much from America to Europe as from Europe to America’’ (‘‘Hybridity,’’ 325). 146


FIGURE 10. Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios

It is important to recognize that the juxtapositions implied by the Conquest, and on top of the pre-Columbian ultimately the Neobaroque as well, are acts pyramid, Cholula, Mexico. of violence. They involve forced superimpoJorge Contreras Chacel/Banco sitions—literally a driving underground of Mexicano de Imágenes. what was there before, even as that originary structure becomes a necessary foundation for the newer, superimposed one. (Serge Gruzinski argues that the Native American cultures responded to the Conquest through ‘‘combinations’’ and ‘‘displacements’’ rather than simply being subsumed or obliterated [Conquest, 282–284]: superimposition as a mode of survival.) A common and richly symbolic architectural aspect of New World cities like Mexico City, Cuzco, and Cholula (the setting of Cambio de piel) involves pre-Hispanic ceremonial centers being destroyed or covered up, and new ceremonial centers being built directly on top of them, often with the same foundations, stones, and sometimes even floor plans or designs and usually using native labor (see Figure 10). On the subject of violent juxtaposition, Sarduy extends this architectural phenomenon to the body. According to Sarduy, bodies, like buildings, are fascinating because of their miles of ‘‘scriptable’’ surface. The body is all skin, a blank slate, writable space. It can be made up, curlicued, crossed and recrossed with tattoos, and altered surgically (cross-dressing and body modification are mainstays of his own fiction, THE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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in novels like Cobra). Since the body is all surface, it is always something else, whatever is written on top of it. But Sarduy makes this claim in a typically Baroque fashion, hinting at the possibility of an underside, of another reading beyond the surface filigree (I shall return to this point later). For the moment, in order to gain a better understanding of the workings of the Baroque body, let us detour through the rather odd topic of indigestion. In Cambio de piel there are several painstaking scenes chronicling the digestive problems of Javier. These problems are clearly symptomatic of his other ills but most importantly of his failure as a writer. At several key moments in the story, including the pivotal scene of revelation when he and his wife, Elizabeth, have a heart-to-heart as they unpack into their hotel room, the narrative is punctuated with reminders of Javier’s hypochondria. His life is regimented by bottles of pills and remedies. In the bathroom Javier takes inventory as Elizabeth appears behind him: Javier tomó el frasco de Stelabid que mantenía en la mano y lo acercó al reflejo de su rostro en el espejo del baño. Tu entraste al baño y te reflejaste detrás de Javier. Bajaste la mirada y tomaste otro frasco y leíste la etiqueta. Este medicamento es de empleo delicado. Acido orático 55.80 mg. Xantina 6.66 mg. (61) [Javier took the bottle of Stelabid that he kept at hand and held it up to the reflection of his face in the bathroom mirror. You came into the bathroom and your reflection appeared behind Javier’s. You looked down and picked up another bottle, and began reading the label. ‘‘To be taken with care. Oratic acid 55.80 mg. Xanthine 6.66 mg.’’]

The couple’s moment of self-awareness, when they realize just how distant they have grown from each other, comes via the precise contents of a laxative. This is a Baroque portrait in a convex mirror, with prescription drugs. In her assessment of Cambio de piel Elena Poniatowska writes about a similarity between Javier, the failed writer, and Carlos Fuentes, the highly successful writer. Poniatowska offers some insights into the constitutions of both men: De no triunfar, Carlos Fuentes habría sido Javier: diplomático, refinado, culto, sin fuerza de carácter. Fuentes dota a Javier muchos rasgos de su persona, les peores naturalmente para exorcisarlos . . . en los sesenta, Carlos 148


empezó a tener una úlcera, al menos eso creía y se puso a recorrer médicos como antes había recorrido sitios arqueológicos y antros populares, a forrarse el estómago con sucesivas capas de leche, quesos, crema, yogurts y otras dietas blandas, atento sólo a su flora intestinal. Nervioso, irritable, no hablaba sino de sus consultas médicas, su frasco de Mélox siempre al alcance de su mano . . . ‘‘¿Verdad que es incomprensible que yo tenga úlcera? Con algo debe pagarse esta angustia que es escribir, porque no es normal que un hombre se siente todos los días frente a la máquina . . . fíjate, sin hacer un solo deporte, una sola actividad física salvo el amor. ¡Claro, el cuerpo tiene que cobrarse!’’ . . . Carlos era capaz de inventarse la peor enfermedad y hacérsela creíble a los demás . . . Pero la curación la tenía el en su cuerpo y su mejor doctor era él mismo. Nunca lo había visto más alegre ni más fuerte que . . . después de una mañana entera frente a su máquina de escribir. Se había liberado de sus demonios . . . él iba inventando o vomitando ¡land ahoy! sus terrores, sus espasmos, los malos ratos que le daba su estómago. Así en Cambio de piel, Carlos Fuentes—alias Javier—se paseaba durante nueve páginas . . . con un tremendo dolor que proviene de un estómago amargo e imprevisto . . . observando el ascenso espeso de los jugos gástricos y el dolor reflejo punzante en la boca del estómago, el latir desordenado del corazón, el peso muerto de las rodillas . . . Así se libera Fuentes de su úlcera, asestándonos sus agruras en una forma tan vivida y tan cruda que al doblar la hoja estamos seguros de haberlas contraído. (¡Ay vida! 39–40) [Had he not been successful, Carlos Fuentes would’ve been Javier: diplomatic, refined, cultured, lacking strength of character. Fuentes bestows upon Javier many of the attributes of his own self, and naturally the worst of those in order to exorcise them . . . in the 1960s, Carlos began having an ulcer, or at least he believed so; and he started going to doctors the same way he had before gone to archaeological sites and the popular dives; he began to wash his stomach with repeated coatings of milk, cheese, cream, yogurt, and other bland diets, attuned only to his intestinal flora. He was nervous and irritable, and he only talked about his medical visits, his bottle of Maalox always at hand . . . ‘‘Isn’t it beyond comprehension that I would have an ulcer? In some way one has to pay for the anguish of writing, because it is just not normal for a man to sit in front of a machine . . . look [at me] I don’t practice a single sport or any physical activity whatsoever except for making love. One has to pay for the body somehow!’’ . . . Carlos was capable of inventing for himself the worst illness and then making it believable to everyone else . . . But he had the cure in his own body, and he was his own best physician. I never saw him happier or stronger . . . than after an entire morning spent in THE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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front of his typewriter. He had freed himself of his demons . . . he went along inventing or vomiting—Land ahoy!—his terrors, his spasms, all the trouble his stomach put him through. Thus in Cambio de piel, Carlos Fuentes—alias Javier—spent nine pages . . . with the tremendous pain of an unexpected acid stomach . . . observing the thick rise of gastric juices and the sharp pain of reflux at the opening of the stomach, irregular heartbeats, the dead weight of the knees . . . This is how Fuentes frees himself of his ulcer, alerting us to his heartburn in such a vivid and crude fashion that upon turning the page we’re convinced we have it as well.]

All these intestinal rumblings recall the lines from Sor Juana’s Primero sueño (1692), where, in the typical and convoluted Baroque idiom of culteranismo, she links night terrors to the process of digestion: . . . lentamente El manjar transformado, . . . . . . . . y el que hervor resultaba bullicioso de la unión entre el húmedo y ardiente, en el maravilloso natural vaso . . . . . . y consiguientemente . . . . . . . . . . . . húmedos vapores el trono racional embarazaban. (lines 838–847) [ . . . gradually transformed its nutriment, . . . . . . . . . The noisy boiling that resulted from uniting the burning humor with the moist in that most wonderful and natural of vessels . . . . . . In consequence the humid and sleep-inducing vapors . . . . . . . . . . . . . were affecting the seat of reason.] (lines 837–847, Trueblood translation)

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In the middle of the Mexican nun’s meditation on how the mind is freed during the dream state we encounter a mechanistic bottom line: no matter how impressive or elevated the thoughts might be, they are still the workings of the brain; and this organ, just like the stomach, is a mere machine subject to messy breakdowns. This points to a materialist Baroque filiation between mental and stomach rumblings— between Gongorismo and borborygmus—via the exigencies of physical distress. In her compelling book The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry argues that the experience of pain tends to silence the person who experiences it. When the body hurts, it is reduced to its most basic physicality: perception and expression become fragmentary and slow, if they are not halted entirely by pain. Coherent communication breaks down, for the body is reduced to its essence, its sheer ‘‘bodiness.’’ The body in pain, in Scarry’s estimation, comes closest to reaching the unadorned and absolute truth and the simplicity of the Aristotelian Real, what she calls the ‘‘transformation of Body into Voice,’’ where all mediation breaks down (Body, 45). The Baroque body is, in fact, the opposite of Scarry’s pained body as ‘‘language-destroying,’’ because the Baroque body is all language, all artifice, always represented, and (recall Sarduy) always scriptable. It is as convoluted and fragmented as any real body, except that the convolution and fragmentation become the point, not the pain. The Baroque version of pain is first and foremost a fanciful mimesis. It is an artistic version of the unmediated body in pain and of its cries. This fanciful representation is what allows so much Baroque art to feature the juxtaposition of wildly unrelated dissimilars (what Paz calls its coincidentia oppositorum [Sor Juana, 106]). As Sarduy has argued, the Baroque overarches opposition, and within it things that really should not coexist can do so seamlessly: desire and death, God and sex, pain and pleasure. We have in the Baroque all those macabre poems where the lover is taken to death’s door by ardor; the Spanish mystics who twist Petrarchan lyric and turn Christ into the object of a sweaty carnal lust; and the myriads of painfully ecstatic Virgin Marys and St. Theresas as venus febriculosa [febrile virgin], like the orgasmic St. Teresa in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpture (1645–1652) (see Figure 11). But these are fake orgasms, and after all wildly theatrical. Scarry observes that the body reduced by pain is unable to speak coherently and instead issues fragmented and incomplete utterances. She

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FIGURE 11.

Ecstasy of Saint

Teresa in Santa Maria de la Vittoria, Rome, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1645–1652). SCALA/Art Resource.

notes that confessions extracted under torture share formal similarities despite cultural differences; the fragmented utterances of a body in pain are indeed so distinct that they offer a solid template, an imitable form. Baroque art reads these forms, imitates them, and turns them into ornament: Sarduy’s ‘‘simulacro’’ and Fuentes’s talent ‘‘de inventarse la peor enfermedad y hacérsela creíble a los demás’’ [of inventing for himself the worst illness and then making it believable to everyone else], as Poniatowska says (¡Ay vida! 39). The distance from actual pain allows the Baroque simulacrum to mine the juxtaposition of pain and pleasure and to render pain risqué—witness the orgasmic St. Teresa and the many dying saints of Baroque art in general. Ecstatic agony is a feature of the Baroque: this agony watches itself agonize and smiles secretly at the spectacle. The case at hand—Javier’s intestinal trouble— serves parodic purposes (parody being another of Sarduy’s hallmarks of the Baroque). Javier’s pain takes an aesthetic shape that can be stylized, ‘‘rococoized,’’ twisted into whimsical contortions. There is lightness to the Baroque body and to the mortal threats and darkness that constantly besiege it, because these terrors are all part of the floating theater of excess.

THE HEAVY PART This disjunction—this tendency of accommodating polar opposites in the Baroque and Neobaroque, their coincidentia oppositorum— brings us to one of the more problematic aspects of the discourse: the nature of its Counter-Reformation politics. This conservative and counterrevolutionary movement was, of course, an attempt on part of the Catholic church to reclaim the aesthetic and moral high ground lost to Protestantism. The historical Baroque is an inescapably reactionary mode; and various twentieth-century left-leaning interpreters of the Baroque have struggled with this fact in various ways. Some, like José Antonio Maravall, try to finesse the question by casting the Baroque as the tool of a forward-looking and enlightened despotism, ‘‘monarchical absolutism’’ as opposed to absolute monarchy. Within this ‘‘monarchical absolutism’’ is supposed to reside a protodemocracy that responds directly to the sensibilities of the common people. According to Maravall, instead of repression, the Baroque monarchy offered imagination as an alternative answer to the same disillusion that had led to the Reformation in the North (Culture, 226–227, 126–145). THE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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Disillusion with the exhausted rituals of an out-of-touch church had led to the radical Protestant simplicity that removed the graven images from niches, translated the Bible into the vernacular so all could understand it, and encouraged the faithful to speak directly to God as one does to a neighbor. In contrast, the Catholics in Spain, the Mediterranean, and Low Germany reacted to this unrest through imagination and through aesthetization, with clouds of gilt and angels. As Wylie Sypher notes, the Baroque represented a concerted effort by the church to undermine the secularizing and highly strung humanist Renaissance by reinvesting human expression with mysticism and flights of fancy: ‘‘by [its] sanctioning [of] the veneration of images and its emphasis upon transubstantiation . . . [it] gave the pious confidence in sensory experience and offered a means of reducing the anxiety in mannerist consciousness, relaxing the tension between body and soul’’ (Four Stages, 27). The thorny issue of the politics of the Baroque winds its way through Latin American manifestations as well; but in the work of Fuentes and Sarduy it gathers new dimensions. As mentioned earlier, thinkers from Henríquez Ureña to Carpentier had seen in the Baroque a resistance movement, a surreptitious counteroffensive on the part of the New World into the heart of Europe and its imaginary, what Lezama calls ‘‘contraconquista’’ [counter-conquest]. As Lois Parkinson Zamora notes in her discussion of Carpentier’s Explosión en la catedral, ‘‘the Baroque is subversive. Historically, the European Baroque denied the frontal vision of the Renaissance perspective . . . So we arrive at one of the few satisfying ironies of the Spanish colonization of Latin America: the form most associated with the cultural repression of the monological Spanish Counter-Reformation in Latin America—the Baroque —provides the very structure with which to subvert that repression’’ (‘‘Magical Ruins,’’ 80–81). I would like to dwell on, and complicate, this ‘‘satisfying irony’’ of counter-counterrevolution with regard to Sarduy and Fuentes and their specific context of the 1960s. Sarduy’s Baroque is an interesting case study in terms of the political nature of the Baroque, because as an exiled Cuban in the 1960s he has a vivid and recent revolution in mind. Sarduy’s version of the Baroque is just as deeply linked to a concept of revolution as Carpentier’s in its emphasis on the subversion of power. Indeed Sarduy, like Fuentes and the rest of the Boom, was initially inspired by the promise of the Cuban Revolution (Fuentes expresses his faith in its ‘‘triunfo y el ejemplo’’ [triumph and example] [La nueva novela, 29]). 154


But I would add that Sarduy’s Revolution, although it began with the Cuban barbudos of the Sierra Maestra, eventually had more in common with the student culture of the 1960s and the revolts of Paris of 1968 than with the ethos of Fidelismo. It is worth noting that in Paris Sarduy was associated with the Tel Quel group (which included Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, etc.). This group first developed the rigors of structuralism during the 1960s but later rejected them, staging its own ‘‘self-revolution’’ in its subsequent poststructuralist phase. The methodical Barthes of S/Z gave way to the playful Barthes who proclaims the death of the author, echoing the taunting yet serious street graffiti of May 1968: ‘‘Il est interdit d’interdire’’ [It is forbidden to forbid]. Sarduy was influenced by these winds of change pungent with tear gas, filled with shouts of ‘‘underneath the flagstones is the beach,’’ and redolent of global paradigm shifts and radical reconsiderations. (Fuentes, it is worth noting, wrote an admiring book of reportage on the événements of 1968: París, la revolución de mayo [1968].) But at the heart of this commitment to real change in the real world lies the dilemma about the function of art. Sarduy, much as he aestheticizes the body, aestheticizes the concept of revolution, abstracting it away from a specific context (a posture that eventually caused a rift between him and the Cuban revolutionary government, with echoes of the avant-garde’s disillusion with the Soviet Revolution during the 1920s and 1930s).1 He displays an attraction to scientific theories that result in explosive change and revolutionary readjustment: the ‘‘big bang’’ theory of the birth of the universe, Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Nicolaus Copernicus’s challenge of terracentrism, and ‘‘solid state’’ physics, all of which unsettled or ‘‘decentered’’ previous systems of belief. This attraction to revolution as a system of advancement through iconoclasm extends to his treatment of the Baroque. In his discussion of the architecture of Francesco Borromini Sarduy notes that in the Baroque circular compositions expand to the point of developing two axes (‘‘anamorfosis del círculo’’). This ex-centricity for Sarduy has an obvious political analogue and embodies what he sees as the paradigm shift (which he then describes in the language of the General Theory of Relativity) of ‘‘un universo móvil y descentrado, pero aún armónico . . . [los] dos ejes epistémicos del siglo barroco: el dios—el verbo de la potencia infinita—. . . y su metáfora, el rey’’ [a movable and decentered universe, yet still in harmony . . . two epistemic axes of the Baroque century: God—the word of infinite power—. . . and his metaphor, the king] (Ensayos, 211). THE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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Sarduy thus makes the idealistic but tenuous connection between the ‘‘primer barroco’’ of the seventeenth century and the Neobaroque of the twentieth, between the revolutions of Copernicus and Einstein and ‘‘real’’ Revolution: ‘‘el barroco actual’’ [the current Baroque], he claims rather wistfully, is ‘‘arte del destronamiento y la discusión . . . Barroco de la Revolución’’ [is the art of dethroning and of discussion . . . Revolutionary Baroque] (Ensayos, 212; my emphasis). Sarduy desperately wishes to see in the Baroque’s compositional qualities of ornament and ex-centricity a political quality. In Neobaroque theatricality he sees dead kings. Likewise, Fuentes’s manifesto La nueva novela hispanoamericana pins its hope for revolution on an explosive new language, on a change of verbal skin, which will lead to a ‘‘fusión de la moral y estética’’ [fusion of morality and aesthetics] and will produce a ‘‘una confrontación dialéctica permanente’’ [a permanent dialectical confrontation] (35). In both Sarduy and Fuentes, we hear echoes of a Trotskyite ‘‘Permanent Revolution,’’ that continuous state of reexamination meant to prevent the return of bourgeois complacency (Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, 132). I would like to offer a counterreading of the revolution according to Sarduy and Fuentes, however: a modest proposal in the same spirit as Dámaso Alonso’s wry little 1927 essay (‘‘Claridad, belleza de las Soledades’’) extolling the simplicity and clarity of Luis de Góngora (Estudios, 66–91). I would argue that—despite the fervent revolutionary spirit at the heart of Fuentes’s Cambio de piel and Sarduy’s ideas on the Neobaroque forever touched by the 1960s—both offer consistency and stability. Both narratives—Fuentes’s narrative ending in a frenzied and apocalyptic collapse and Sarduy’s tale of the paradigmatic shakeups implicit in the Baroque—are, despite their aims and appearances, firmly grounded. They are texts of inestabilidad through and through, it is true. But while this inestabilidad is a reflection of Latin American realities, it is also a self-conscious representation, an aesthetic and rhetorical device akin to Fuentes’s body wracked by phantom stomach troubles, belying his obvious good health. I invoke here Bakhtin’s notion of carnival: before Lent the world is temporarily turned upside down and made into a ritual space that is celebratory and also subversive and renewing. In his meditation on the differences between the revolutionary qualities of Bakhtin’s carnival and Walter Benjamin’s millenarianism, Terry Eagleton quietly notes that Bakhtin’s ‘‘Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as dis156


turbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. As Shakespeare’s Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool’’ (Walter Benjamin, 148). In short, the idealistic utopianism of carnival does not offer a true revolution but rather a staged one occurring in a sanctioned place; and upon its conclusion the revelers return to the fold. Despite its disruptive nature liminality promotes stability and the status quo. Sarduy’s revolutionary Neobaroque and Fuentes’s revolutionary renovations share a paradoxical similarity with liminality: a stable instability.2 This institutionalized instability, the ‘‘sanctioned affair’’ of the theatrical explosion in the cathedral (or in this case the explosion of the pyramid and the santuario), is cleverly composed, carefully timed, ritually hardened. I by no means wish to brand Fuentes a collaborationist; but this maneuver, this explosive change as an aesthetic device, recalls an oxymoron that runs deep within Mexican history and psyche: institutionalized revolution, as in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which is a monolith and a far a cry from Trotskyite permanent revolution. The paradox—institutionalized revolution, Fuentes’s ‘‘confrontación dialéctica permanente’’—is by itself compelling and becomes Baroque in its metaphoric projection upon Fuentes himself: Fuentes the monumental figure and an institution in his own right, wracked with debilitating pain, his body in revolt. This is a tantalizingly Baroque figuration. Recall Poniatowska’s observation that the hypochondria is alleviated by writing. The commitment to convoluted representation seems to make the maladies less weighty and more superficial and textural: the figure of Javier wracked with pain is funny and pathetic. So would Poniatowska’s version of Fuentes be, hunched over his Maalox and his yogurt, if he were to succeed in letting the pain go deep and take over; but once he bears down and pounds out the pages, he is cured. The instability of the body and the body politic, in both Sarduy and Fuentes, contains its own remedy, its own stability. Committing to aesthetic forms in order to exorcise pain renders the purported instability of the Neobaroque a necessary and authorizing fiction. The rumbling of Fuentes’s stomach is part of an aesthetic body, much more than any real body politic, despite protestations to the contrary. What does this mean exactly? Is Fuentes apolitical or falsely political? Is he an example of Eagleton’s ‘‘allowed fool’’? Indeed several of his harshest and most articulate critics have accused Fuentes of just such hypocrisy.3 At the very least he is seen by some as a poTHE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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litical opportunist and at worst as a craven ‘‘gesticulador’’ [gesticulator] for whom commitment to innovation both aesthetic and political is part of an act (Krauze, ‘‘La comedia mexicana,’’ 16–21). José Donoso explains in his Historia personal (1972) that the collapse of the Latin American Boom as a movement after Cuba’s 1971 censorship of the poet Heberto Padilla was more the result of long-simmering personal differences than of politics. This collapse opened the door for detractors to issue postmortems claiming that the Boom had been evanescent and contrived, nothing more than an invention of the Barcelonan publishing machinery and the literary agent Carmen Balcells. According to this view the Boom was a bubble that got too big and simply went bust. Likewise some of the less perceptive, and jealous, critics of Fuentes within Mexico (for instance, Luis Guillermo Piazza in La mafia) have long accused him of being an intellectual mandarin and a literary caudillo who engineered his own fame at the expense of more deserving younger talent, in effect operating an intellectual monopoly through gatekeeping powers not really deserved. Much of this sound and fury is the result of somewhat comprehensible, if predictable, resentment, given the international visibility of Fuentes, in contrast to most other Mexican writers regardless of talent. Furthermore, according to Donoso, Fuentes was the galvanizing force behind the Boom, the one who, as Poniatowska explains, made the world take notice (‘‘antes los mexicanos se quedaban a la orilla, rumiando sus rencores . . . Fuentes vio a los famosos y ¡zas! En menos que canta un gallo ya estaba sentado en sus rodillas’’ [before, Mexicans were stuck to one side, nursing their resentments . . . Fuentes saw the famous and bang! In a flash, he was on their laps] [Poniatowska, ¡Ay vida! 14–15]). Whether other intellectuals like it or not, Fuentes is a monument who stands for Mexico and, indeed, represents all of Latin America. Given this enormous stature, his detractors miss the point entirely: Fuentes is weak. Fuentes’s body is in pain and vulnerable, or so he fancies, for he is haunted by the threat of its failure. Even if these fears are clearly psychosomatic and imaginary, they are nonetheless quite real to him, since his imagination is a force to be reckoned with. The fear is real, even if the actual failure is not. It turns out that the real failure is of the hypochondria, of the weakness itself, for his illness is imaginary and its own failure produces success: pages and pages. The impacted logic is most deliciously gongorista: Fuentes is a fantastic failure as a failed writer. 158


Roland Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte (another book that, along with Cambio de piel, is in dialogue with Sarduy’s Neobaroque) deals with the tug-and-pull of erotic attraction. Partiality and evanescence are what compel and attract, writes Barthes. ‘‘The intermittance of skin flashing between two articles of clothing,’’ an incomplete nude body, or a postponed act compels the viewer to want to see more (Pleasure, 10). For Cambio de piel, the reading of the physical world is similarly interstitial; but instead of being erotic it is disastrous. The thrill of Cambio de piel, its jouissance, is due not to the promise of skin but rather to the promise of calamity, of collapse, of a change of skin. As Lois Parkinson Zamora and Roberto González Echevarría have both observed, the themes of impending doom and cataclysms of an apocalyptic order run throughout the Baroque and Neobaroque. Likewise, the titillation of Cambio de piel comes from the possibility that the whole edifice, and artifice, may come tumbling down. When it does so at the end of the narrative, this does not necessarily stop the titillation, because (as I hope I have argued) the collapse is a put-on, a Baroque figure of the world-as-stage, and very much part of the act. There is a deeper paradox as well, a structural paradox that cuts to the quick of Sarduy’s Baroque body. Sarduy’s claim that the body is all surface and only as deep as its writable skin is a typically Baroque claim; but in fact Baroque surface always implies an underside, a palimpsestic reading underneath the surface filigree. As in Sor Juana’s ‘‘maravilloso y natural vaso’’ [that most wonderful and natural of vessels], the Baroque body also has density and innards, mass and gravity, despite its apparent weightlessness. The layers upon layers speak to thickness, to a certain depth that pretends not to be there, like the archaeological layers of history piled on top of the pyramid of Cholula. The Baroque body, despite its apparent lightness, has weight. A good illustration of this negotiation of weightlessness with weightiness is a Baroque work, the transparente of the Cathedral of Toledo (1721–1732), by Narciso Tomé, built in the eighteenth century into a much older and mostly Gothic cathedral (see Figure 12). In the chapel behind the main altar of the cathedral, and in the midst of dark, vaulting Gothic arches, we find this High Baroque, almost garish explosion of light. In order to illuminate the lines and elaborate gold leaf of the altarpiece, a skylight was cut into the cupola above it, through which a column of bright sunlight pierces the darkness and falls onto it. The skylight is so important to the composition that the whole assemblage is referred to not as a retablo (altarpiece) but by the THE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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FIGURE 12.

Transparente of the

Cathedral of Toledo, by Narciso Tomé (1721–1732). Photography taken from Art and Architecture of Spain, ed. Xavier Barral i Altet, Bulfinch Press, 1998 (original title: Historia del arte de España, published originally in Spanish by Lunwerg Editores).

name transparente, its source of light—it is as if the skylight itself were vomiting the brilliant carvings onto the wall. Here, as in Baroque painting, is the manipulation of light in order to create depth: light becomes volume. This theatrical piece of illumination comes at a risk, however. Interpretive guides inform visitors that the hole in the ceiling constantly threatens the structural integrity of the roof and that the whole edifice has been in danger of tumbling down since the eighteenth century, when the transparente was cut. The Baroque is a belated style, one that necessarily lies on (and relies upon) previous styles, which it engages and ultimately threatens. It plays with, expands, and improvises on these previous styles (Alejo Carpentier played upon the similarity between the improvisational techniques of jazz and Baroque music in Concierto barroco [70–71]). But this belated, almost parasitic existence also undermines its own power and support, even if the impending collapse is just a threat, a failure in potentia that never happens. The apocalyptic climax of Cambio de piel is just such a disaster. When the pyramid of Cholula implodes and only Javier and Isabel emerge unscathed, this is only one of several alternative endings. Javier returns to the hotel and collapses in a kind of ontological exhaustion that recalls the beginning of Góngora’s Soledades: 4 the body emerges from the tempest after a pummeling of heavy symbols and excessive language. But the body of the hypochondriac is always in better shape and more robust than the sufferer fancies it is: ‘‘ ‘¡Claro, el cuerpo tiene que cobrarse!’ ’’ [One has to pay for the body somehow!] (Poniatowska, ¡Ay vida! 39). Fuentes complains about the physical troubles that his writing seems to cause him. But Baroque double meaning raises the following question about Fuentes’s cry of pain: is the corpus—the body of work—at the expense of the physical body or vice versa? The stomach rumblings and the foundational and constitutional instabilities of Javier, of Fuentes, of the novel, and of the Baroque itself are indeed fanciful and somewhat misleading. The name of the narrator, Freddy Lambert, alludes to Honoré de Balzac’s novel Louis Lambert (1832), which tells the story of a misunderstood and brilliant philosopher who never lives up to the great promise of his youth: he was supposed to write a grand unification theory of all things but fails miserably at it. Another way in which Balzac’s Lambert does not live up to expectations is rather counterintuitive. The narrator explains that the absentminded and sensitive young Lambert was often taunted by his schoolmates—but, instead of proving to be the physically frail creature THE THREATS OF COLLAPSE IN CAMBIO DE PIEL

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of the mind one would expect him to be, Lambert proves surprisingly capable of ‘‘summoning to his aid at certain times the most extraordinary powers’’ and of giving a ‘‘strange display’’ of strength (Louis Lambert, 163). Lambert is, as the narrator says, ‘‘at once so powerful and so weak’’ (170). Likewise, Carlos Fuentes was in the 1960s and is still both quite a healthy man and a robust monument of Mexican letters (true to Gustavo Sainz’s estimation alluded to earlier). Yet his pain and his insecurity are palpable, and we must not dismiss them or the conceptual tortuousness that accompanies them. His body is in revolt—and whether this is psychosomatic or real is beside the point: it is Baroque and therefore both, yet another coincidentia oppositorum. In good Baroque fashion the novel regales the reader with the showy and apparently total collapse of the monument and the metaphor of Cholula, but it does not end with this apocalypse. As mentioned, there are several short alternative dénouements that follow the collapse, like the varied repeats at the end of a Baroque fugue. I have described one of these variant endings, in which only the two Mexicans Isabel and Javier emerge from the ruins as the new Adam and Eve, their foreign lovers eliminated by the disaster. In another ending Elizabeth survives and comes to visit the narrator, Freddy, in his insane asylum. This narrator, we should note, admits that he admires the Baroque because it possesses ‘‘un orden confuso de un estilo que permite una infinidad de acercamientos’’ [a confused order of a style that allows an infinite number of approaches] (Cambio de piel, 215). Yet this ‘‘infinidad de acercamientos’’ [infinite number of approaches] cannot be infinite, for the narrative would then become shapeless, amorphous, and unpredictable: in true Baroque style, even the ‘‘infinidad’’ is a carefully crafted and framed simulacrum of infinity, much as its pain is a simulacrum of pain. This proclivity for multiple endings yields yet another stable instability: a single ending would have been the true disaster, for it would have meant the collapse of the fiction of multiplicity, an end to the supposed endlessness of endings, a premature conclusion to an infinite jest and play of mirrors. It is quite possible that the narrator is not as mad as he looks or claims. It is only possible that he is mad; but this possibility is a destabilizing force and yet another carefully calculated impending threat. Whether he simulates madness in a carefully contrived exercise or is genuinely mad is of no consequence: the effect is the same, as with Fuentes’s real or imagined dyspepsia. The accumulation of threats to stability—the hints of destruction

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of bodies, buildings, and books—gives wings to fantasy and offers license to novelize. Earlier in the novel the narrator describes Javier in a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged loafer, avoiding his boring office work by walking aimlessly and staring into storefronts. He stops to look through a store window at some jamoncillos (milk candies). Simply looking at the confections sends him into a reverie of pain, a reflex of reflux: Se detiene a observar los jamoncillos de almendra y los jugos gástricos redoblan su circulación maldita, quemante, acompañada del dolor reflejo . . . Y luego, como si de ahí se enviara un mensaje ponzoñoso . . . que le hiere cerca del hígado que quisiera cubrir con una capa protectora de azúcar si no supiera que el jamoncillo, al alimento a esos ácidos devorantes, le provocará una indigestión nerviosa . . . ese espasmo que se anuncia y que nada podrá contener . . . lo bombardeará[n] con los gases que hinchan el vientre duro, tenso, y le asegurará el estreñimiento prolongado que luego . . . sólo podrá resolver con la indignidad del supositorio de glicerina que venden en los frascos estriados y transparentes de tapa negra . . . y para eso tiene que solicitar la ayuda de su mujer y tenderse, sin calzones, sobre la cama, cubierta parcialmente por una toalla, y abrir las piernas, y buscar él mismo el ano nervioso y encontrar la manera de relajarlo para que entre el bitoque y sentirá que esa mica dura y negra le penetra equivocadamente, se sale del conducto y le perfora hasta la tráquea donde se refleja la desazón de esa violencia hasta que siente el líquido tibio que corre hasta el centro. (45) [He stops to look at the candies made of milk and almonds, and the gastric juices step up their damned and burning flow accompanied by reflex pain . . . And then, as if from there a poisonous message had been sent . . . one that pierces close to the liver he wishes he could cover with a protective coat of sugar if he weren’t aware that the candies, food to those voracious acids, would provoke a nervous indigestion . . . that spasm that announces itself and that nothing can contain . . . They will bombard him with gases that extend the hard, tense belly and will guarantee the long-lasting bout of constipation . . . which he will be able to resolve only with the indignity of the glycerin suppository that comes in the striated and clear bottles with the black cap . . . and for this he has to request the help of his wife and must stretch himself on the bed minus his underwear partially covered with a towel and open his legs and himself search for the tense anus and then find a way of relaxing it so that the bolus can penetrate, and he will feel

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that hard, black pill-casing penetrate vacillatingly, emerge from the passage and pierce him up to his throat, where he finds a reflection of that violence, to the point where he feels the warm liquid flowing to his very core.]

Simply watching candy is enough to spin tales, to improvise with Baroque precision and overwhelming detail the imminent disaster. This disaster exists within a single piece of candy, initiating with unpleasant rumblings and gradually growing with vaulting leaps into the realm of overwrought artifice: this is a laxative, a Baroque madeleine that loosens the creative flow and produces a gush of productive logorrhea that speaks at once to decrepitude and to towering monumentality. This juxtaposition brings to mind two other monumental Mexican ‘‘failures,’’ Sor Juana and Juan Rulfo; but whereas their failures were tied to their silence (after the magnificent ‘‘Respuesta a Sor Filotea’’ and Pedro Páramo, respectively, both writers recused themselves from the world), Fuentes is most definitely not about to vanish from the stage or the world, no matter how distressing that thought might be.

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CHAPTER 6

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Bordering on Madness and Performing Liminality

For our final consideration we come to the border, both literal and metaphorical. For this I invoke the story of one of the most memorable border figures in Hispanic literature, Miguel de Cervantes’s licenciado Vidriera. He is found in the Novelas ejemplares (1613), in an odd little short story about a ‘‘wise’’ madman who has come to believe that he is made of glass and because of this odd delusion becomes marginalized and is made a spectacle. He uses the limelight, however, to begin issuing outrageous and often offensive pronouncements—all to the growing delight of the crowd. The voice of this ranting holy fool, whose delusion of transparency gives him license to criticize, reverberates throughout Hispanic culture. We hear his echoes in Lizardi, in José Rodó’s Ariel (1900), and in Vasconcelos’s bizarre, séance-like pronouncement from the wilderness. More recently, reinvigorated by postmodernity’s penchant for ironic dissociation, the voice of the mad licenciado has resonated again: a recent ‘‘Vidriera’’ madman is the Zapatista guerrilla leader subcomandante Marcos, who during the Chiapas uprisings of the 1990s broadcast his witty, disembodied, and self-ironic communiqués from the jungle over the Internet. Yet another contemporary, self-reflexive ‘‘Vidriera’’ madman is the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a man who describes himself as a ‘‘Mexican in the process of Chicanoization’’ (New World Border, 102). This chapter examines the work of Gómez-Peña through the filter of the licenciado Vidriera’s peculiar madness. The licenciado is a very specific kind of holy fool. Many other famous fools—William Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear, François Rabelais’s Panurge, even Cervantes’s own Sancho Panza—use their position as mad oracle to offer witty, topical wisdom, the significance of which seems either lost or immaterial to the fool himself but is received by his hearers with wonder.Vidriera, in contrast, seems to be keenly aware of the nature of his folly; and in a way his supposed wisdom offers to society a parody of the insights that it expects to receive from its mad-

men. Gómez-Peña, like Vidriera, is a master rhetorician who appears to offer pointed social and political criticism but who also critiques the privilege of offering advice: by calling attention to the spectacle of wisdom, he at once exploits and questions the place of wisdom itself. At first blush, the story of the licenciado Vidriera would seem to belong to the picaresque genre. It begins on the banks of the River Tormes, at the same place where the Lazarillo begins, and also starts with a rootless young boy who is taken and apprenticed by strangers. But here we run into a departure from the genre: the strangers in this case happen to be students, so it appears that Tomás’s new occupation will be the life of the mind. The students take him with them into their quarters at the university, and Tomás indeed excels at book learning; as he says, it is a way to make headway in life, since he has heard that men can become bishops through learning. This becomes one of the central themes of the story: an awareness of the privileging power of knowledge. Tomas’s initial apprenticeship in the scholarly life colors the rest of what would normally be, according to picaresque conventions, a succession of apprenticeships in other pursuits. Tomás is given the opportunity to move onto other pursuits when an officer going abroad offers to take him along on his military expedition. Tomás wishes to go, for, as the narrator states, ‘‘las luengas peregrinaciones hacen a alos hombres discretos’’ [long pilgrimages increase men’s knowledge and discretion] (Novelas, 2:107). But he agrees to go only if he can remain an aloof scholar, saying that ‘‘no se había de sentar debajo de bandera’’ [he would bow to no flag] except the flag of learning. This wish for a cerebral, bookish stance almost makes him disappear from the narrative. As Ruth El-Saffar notes, we barely see or hear the main character in this section, and the narrative flattens into a panoramic Guide bleu of Italy, listing wines, places to visit, and sights to see in an engaging if impersonal style (From Novel to Romance, 54).The main character, in his goal to remain cerebral, is already showing the symptoms of his future ‘‘invisibility.’’ When he returns from his travels, a rejected would-be lover poisons him with a quince; and after a protracted illness, he awakens with the conviction that he is made of glass. This delusion frees the licenciado from all materiality and seems an extension of his ultimate goal of achieving pure, disembodied knowledge. In his new madness, he begins spouting wit, criticism, and assorted trivia to anyone who will listen. Crowds gather to listen to the marvelous madman, who quickly becomes a celebrity. It seems that 166


the vast amounts of information that have collected inside his head for years have broken loose. As Foucault notes in Madness and Civilization, until the late Renaissance madness was intricately tied to arcane knowledge: ‘‘Madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first, because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning’’ (21). The imagery of the licenciado’s madness is also typical of the Baroque Theater of the World, of life-as-stage: glass, mirrors, and windows are all visual instruments of reflection and selfreflection; and the glassy licenciado seems to be at once a reflective prism and a holy fool.1 According to Foucault, madness had a recognizable place and shape in Western culture at least until the late Renaissance, when it was pathologized, and therapeutic treatments and institutions were established in order to treat it; before then, the fool’s accepted role had been to make society see itself from the outside. Although the mad were twilight figures, not quite part of society, they had a set place, if not within at least in relation to that society: they were different; they were wise; and they had access to information unavailable to the sane and still within. Society had contingencies in place to accept, and learn from, the fool. The fool was by definition a liminal figure, a borderline creature for whom the normal rules were reprieved. He or she was a semipermanent inhabitant of the liminal stage, where normally a whole community (for instance, during certain festivals like carnival) or individuals (during certain rites of passage, like funerals, coronations, and puberty rites) are temporarily freed from the norms, deliberately marginalized, and locked in the threshold between the mainstream and the margin. Again, it is important to recall that liminality occurs through the grace and venue of the mainstream. Despite the countercultural carnival that Bakhtin describes so compellingly, liminality is not revolutionary. Liminality is hard-wired into culture and is in fact meant to preserve culture by allowing it to renovate through its ‘‘outsideness.’’ Liminality is a contingency of culture. ‘‘Edgemen,’’ as Victor Turner calls liminal beings, are those ‘‘betwixt and between’’ the dictates of ‘‘law, custom, convention and ceremonial’’ (Ritual Process, 95), but they are marginalized from within. Culture has ways of acknowledging and employing this position ‘‘betwixt and between.’’ Likewise, as Foucault explains, within European culture madness typically existed as a recognizable and even useful fixture as a kind of permanent liminality. This lasted until the culture changed with GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEN˜ A

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the advent of the scientific method and the rise of empiricism around the seventeenth century, when madness was suddenly was banished as ‘‘unreasonable’’ and hidden away in madhouses and prisons; society’s contingencies for dealing with the mad were thus repressed. But until this transformation the madman had been in a certain way privileged: ‘‘his exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage’’ (Foucault, Madness, 11). The mad, then, were the consummate liminal outsiders, and society knew exactly what they were and where they belonged, ‘‘at the point of passage.’’ Poor Tomás, by being poisoned, has gone through the looking glass and is trapped in such a liminal state, in the ‘‘threshold itself’’ 2—or so it would seem. There is something not quite right with the liminal licenciado’s lucid madness. Vidriera’s insanity, like Don Quixote’s, stems from too much book-learning. But the worlds conjured by their respective madnesses are polar opposites. In his delusion Don Quixote recreates the fantasy world of chivalry to escape his humdrum existence as a country squire, a reality that simply would not contain his imagination. When he ventures out into his imagined adventures, he also ventures into the harsh outside world. His mad new universe is internally coherent—perhaps more so than the messy ‘‘real’’ world into which he crashes headlong, which turns out to be an unforgiving place full of ignoramuses, greedy innkeepers, petty thieves, and escaped convicts: the clash of Quixote’s ordered madness with the brutality of this ‘‘real’’ world generates real pathos. His imagined world, since it is cleaner and more contained than reality, is out of rhythm with that cruel reality. The licenciado’s mad world, in contrast, is almost overwhelmingly synchronous with the real world. Despite Cervantes’s clear identification of the licenciado as an insightful holy fool, the actual ‘‘wisdom’’ that the licenciado begins to spout once he ‘‘liminizes’’ seems oddly banal. His sententious ‘‘insights’’ are indeed funny and topical, but they are often narrow, mean-spirited, extremely local to the point of irrelevance, or simply playful without being truly wise. The licenciado’s comments fall into tired satirical categories: anecdotes or puns attacking easy targets (like prostitutes, the vain, or ethnic groups); inoffensive jokes about stereotypes (for instance, the fairly conventional discourse praising poetry but damning poets or his puns at the expense of bankers); and ‘‘folk’’ or ribald ‘‘wisdom’’ (as in the tale of a washerwoman and her decked-out daughter). What he says is too local and too topical to resonate in any universal way.3 168


We keep expecting earthshaking maxims, but we slowly become aware that they are not forthcoming. What the licenciado says is not really wisdom. Indeed the narrative seems to become a patchedtogether list of clumsy apothegmas. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce speculates that Cervantes simply transcribed popular sayings from reference books (‘‘Introducción,’’ 2:24); and Luis Rosales remarks that the licenciado’s humor lacks the ‘‘gaiety and generosity of understanding of Cervantes’s great humor’’ (in Forcione, Cervantes, 269). Instead of the Bakhtinian ‘‘lower body’’ humor of Don Quixote, we get a mundane wit bordering on the uninsightful, a humor which is somehow damaged or ‘‘diseased’’ (Forcione, Cervantes, 269). The narrow topical allusions to the weather in Valladolid and the throwaway jokes about loose women are hardly the earth-shattering and oracular truths that the licenciado’s spectacular condition would lead us to expect. So we begin to suspect that there is something not quite right with this madness. We have the faint sense that it might be a put-on or an act: in short, that the licenciado is performing having crossed into madness, rather than actually having done so: at one point the supposedly crystallized licenciado recoils when he is bitten by a wasp; when asked why he can feel the pain if he is made of glass, he wittily responds that the wasp must have been a gossip (Novelas, 2:140). It is thus possible to read ‘‘El licenciado Vidriera’’ as a primer in performance art. Tomás’s passage into ‘‘madness’’ is one doubly born from knowledge: it is what Gómez-Peña would call an ‘‘intervention,’’ in which a performer goes out into the ‘‘field’’ and performs an act that explodes one of society’s convictions by offering an exaggerated example. In a sense, Tomás has truly become the knowledgeable, reflective vessel he announces himself to be. If the members of his audience look closely enough, they can see true insight into themselves and their system of beliefs. They are not learning anything new about mundane things like prostitutes or the plight of poets or the weather in Valladolid; rather, they are being shown the function of liminality itself and its relationship to ‘‘wisdom.’’ The licenciado appropriates the trappings of madness, announces himself to society as a certifiable and recognizable fool, and then waits to see what happens. His true revelation consists of laying bare the expectations of ‘‘wisdom.’’ He earns the rubric ‘‘wise fool’’ because his audience has recognized him that way and has chosen to believe in him. While he may not be Foucault’s madman as otherworldly clairvoyant—as the on-target eyepiece through which people can see hidden truths and unknown things—he GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEN˜ A

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is a conduit to an obvious, if unacknowledged, truth. Tomás Rodajanow-Vidriera is a holy fool in reverse. Vidriera inhabits the role of the holy fool ironically, as a put-on (he is, after all, a pícaro): instead of being an otherworldly, oracular voice from the wilderness speaking in a way that makes sense, his voice is ridiculously corporeal. It claims to make sense while issuing nonsense, yet it still attracts the attention normally accorded to wise fools. The licenciado draws crowds not because of the content of his utterances but rather because of his spectacular condition, resulting from his position as purportedly liminal. His voice is validated by his supposed glassiness, by the sheer ‘‘spectacle’’ of something to see—or to see through. The value placed on the trappings of madness is clear when Tomás returns to court, finally ‘‘cured’’ and no longer claiming to be made of glass but still issuing ‘‘wisdom.’’ When he asks the audience to consider instead of ‘‘las cosas que dicen que dije cuando loco . . . las que diré y haré cuando cuerdo’’ [the things that they say I said while mad . . . the things I will say and do while sane], the people instantly lose interest (Novelas, 2:143). The brilliant young man’s newfound body is like the emperor’s new clothes. Now that the invisible wise man is visible again, the crowds scatter because there is nothing to see.

GÓMEZ-PEÑA, DOCUMENTED VATO LOCO AND MCARTHUR-CERTIFIED GENIUS Guillermo Gómez-Peña, like the licenciado Vidriera, is a selfconscious border-crosser. Most of his major performance projects of the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s—works like Border brujo (1988–1992) and 1992 (1992) and his collaborative work with Coco Fusco in The Guatinaui World Tour (1992–1993)—cross generic and class borders. They combine theater, visual arts, religious rituals, poetry slams, and multimedia presentations with political activism; as José Saldívar has noted, in Gómez-Peña’s eclectic work ‘‘low-tech/hi-tech signals coexist (norteño vs. opera, Gregorian chants vs. the pelado’s signifyings made famous by Cantinflas, about avant-garde vs. rasquachi ), all with an unmistakable class message: High versus mass culture’’ (Border Matters, 157). Gómez-Peña’s performances, sometimes presented in public spaces like museums and pedestrian malls, are generally documented in ‘‘performance notes,’’ journals, or videos and collected in

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published volumes along with photographs, CDs, manifestos, critical essays, and ‘‘performance poetry.’’ 4 These performances and texts include many references to GómezPeña’s personal history. A member of the Mexican educated class who studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), he came north to study performance at Cal Arts in 1978. Yet in the way he describes his immigration he deliberately aligns himself with the plight of the working poor. Although he does not hide his education and artistic formation in Mexico City, he invites comparisons between his personal journey and that of millions of undocumented migrants, on the basis of a shared crossing of the border as a traumatic ritual (for instance, the staged 1979 photo of a bare-chested GómezPeña at an Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center; see Figure 13). Much of Gómez-Peña’s early solo work ruminates on the ‘‘the pain of departure and the indescribable loneliness of the immigrant’’ (Warrior, 20). Because of the obvious class implications of this posture, he has been accused of exploiting the immigrant experience—in effect of being one more Mexican intellectual who has come north in search of new material. Writers from Paz to Fuentes have done this in the past— in a sense also crossing the border looking for work but in a very different way than the countless people who breach the divide every day.5 Gómez-Peña insists that the beginning of his artistic voyage, what he calls ‘‘my American birth rite,’’ took place in the crossing: ‘‘I crossed the border in 1978 and something broke inside of me, forever . . . [this] abrupt confrontation with otherness triggered many processes inside of me, the most significant being the exploration of the conflictive relationship between my Mexican past and my U.S. present’’ (Warrior, 20). His border crossing, meant to recall the traumatic experience of the Mexican diaspora, recalls more Vidriera’s poisoning: he emerges from this rite of passage as a changed subject—not an illegal alien, but instead someone whose role it is to explore and represent the ‘‘conflictive relationship’’ of the two cultures he is spanning. In other words, he emerges as a politically committed artist. Despite the importance of the border as a sign for Gómez-Peña, its crossing is not necessarily traumatic in the same way it is for the millions of migrants whose experience he seeks to represent. But it is an equally foundational and definitional act; his immigration is his inaugural act of self-conscious performance.

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FIGURE 13. Staged photograph of Gómez-Peña as

‘‘el mojado peligroso’’ [the dangerous wetback] at an INS detention center (1979), from the Archives of Poyesis Genética. Photo courtesy La Pocha Nostra.

For Gómez-Peña visibility and invisibility are key elements to crossing the line, as they are for Vidriera. In one of the few references to his artistic expression before his ‘‘borderization,’’ in the poem titled ‘‘My First Performance Ever (Morelia, 1974),’’ he tells about his unmomentous beginnings back in Mexico:

I entered church. I hide behind the pulpit. Three days pass by. No one discovers me. I get bored. I return to the hotel. 172


I try to commit suicide. I receive no phone calls. I get bored. I go out to the plaza. I buy 10 avocados. I throw them to the cops. They don’t seem to mind. I get bored. [The journalists ignore The importance of my actions.] (Warrior, 143)

The actions chronicled in deadpan fashion—throwing avocados, hiding in a church—are as arbitrary and meaningless as Vidriera’s ‘‘wisdom’’ and are carried out with the same hope for attention, but no one cares. It seems that the ‘‘importance’’ of Gómez-Peña’s actions is determined by having an audience and a context and not by any transcendent meaning. His first performance in the United States was significantly similar to this ignored ‘‘first performance.’’ It involved ‘‘hiding’’ for twenty-four hours wrapped in a cloth—not behind the solitary pulpit of a church but rather inside a busy elevator in Los Angeles. But this time he received a bit of attention. ‘‘My total anonymity and vulnerability seemed to grant people the freedom to confess intimate things to me . . . to verbally abuse me, and to kick me. I overheard two adolescents discuss the possibility of setting me on fire, a dog peed on me’’ (New World Border, 82). The biggest thing that happened to GómezPeña when he crossed the border is that his ironic yen for spectators (‘‘the journalists ignore / The importance of my actions’’) was fulfilled —yet another echo of the licenciado Vidriera’s ‘‘long pilgrimage’’ into highly visible invisibility. Far from being an inconspicuous illegal border crossing, his crossing is amply documented. Gómez-Peña’s ‘‘border’’ is clearly different from the border of many of the Chicano artists, activists, and theorists with whom he has aligned himself politically and aesthetically. For the poet and essayist Gloria Anzaldúa, the border is traumatic, static, and atavistic, and in many ways a trap: The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds . . . Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, and to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. (Borderlands, 3) GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEN˜ A

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This kind of traumatic division for Anzaldúa has resulted in a tyrannical dualism (‘‘what we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we’re able to be only one or the other’’ [Borderlands, 19]), a tyranny which must be resisted. Its opposite, however, is synthesis, mestizaje, ‘‘merging to form a third country,’’ representing the potentially redeeming outcome of the trauma. For Anzaldúa, as for many other Chicana artists and thinkers, the tentatively positive aspect of the border (both literal and metaphoric) is that it is a place of hybridity; it is where plural realities can conjoin into a richly multiple, articulated reality and into what many have termed the ‘‘raza cósmica’’ [cosmic race] (a term indirectly taken from Vasconcelos). For a theorist like Alfred Arteaga, border-crossing and racial hybridization result in a new and positive subjectivity, a ‘‘xicano,’’ defined by the sign of the x, which is more than the sum total of any of its origins: ‘‘xicano is the subject of Aztlán the cultural nation but not the state and not subject to capricious borderlines . . . Hybridity is a fundamental physical reality of chicanismo’’ (Chicano Poetics, 155, 11). The crossing, in other words, means—or can ideally mean—fusion. Fusion, hybridity, and mestizaje are constant themes of much recent U.S. Latino/Latina literature, theory, and criticism—for instance, in Cherríe Moraga’s ‘‘identity that dissolves borders’’ (‘‘Art in América,’’ 36) or Gustavo Pérez-Firmat’s notion of ‘‘life on the hyphen.’’ Ilan Stavans claims that Chicanos’ early cultural and political awareness— which initially fostered resistance and a move toward relative independence—has given way (roughly in the last twenty-five years) to ‘‘notions of transcreation and transculturation’’ (Hispanic Condition, 13). This syncretic vision—whose patron theorists have been the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and Vasconcelos—has been so persistent that it has found its way into other ethnic discourses (for instance, in Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian, where Vasconcelos is invoked [190, 202]). In contrast, Gómez-Peña’s border deflects true synthesis. Unlike Anzaldúa’s border, ‘‘merging to form a third country,’’ his relies on the binarism that the fence and the river afford; his border depends on the double (and multiple) articulation. Gómez-Peña’s work rages against essentialisms: ‘‘terms like Hispanic, Latino, ethnic, minority, marginal, alternative, and Third World, among others, are inaccurate and loaded with ideological implications. They create categories and hierarchies that promote political dependence and cultural underestimation’’ (‘‘Multicultural Paradigm,’’ 18). Yet his attempt to de-essentialize nationality, race, and language opens itself to an obvious critique: once 174


the artist as committed social commentator pulls out the rug from all situational alliances, all ‘‘belongingness,’’ nothing is left but depoliticized glassiness. Gómez-Peña’s early activist art during the 1980s (for instance, his work with Poyesis Genética and with Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo) was intensely local. In The End of the Line (12 October 1986) the performers set up a dinner table on the beach where the Mexico-U.S. border runs into the Pacific, passed food across the table/ border, and occasionally changed seats and thus crossed illegally several times during the performance. Critics often cite his departure from this early ‘‘site-specific’’ community-performance art in favor of highconcept and individual performance as an abdication, a ‘‘universalization’’ of what should remain a very specific border.6 As Claire Fox puts it: ‘‘The idea of alternation among personae, spaces, and languages is so integral to the performance that it raises the issue of whether GómezPeña would really like to see borders eliminated, or whether his work is indeed dependent upon borders to uphold the oppositions that he critiques’’ (Fence, 125).7 His work seeks to preserve the various realities meeting head to head in the border and to mine the dualities created by it, all as part of an artistic program. These categories, he implies, are still vital and if nothing else useful as a teaching tool: ‘‘We have no choice but to utilize them, but with extreme care’’ (‘‘Multicultural Paradigm,’’ 19): I stand out in front of an academic audience linguists, sociologists, anthropologists surveilling my ‘‘authenticity’’ los muy cabrones MEROLICO & PACHUCO VOICES [alternating]: me dicen el half & half half-Indian/half Spaniard half-Mexican/half-Chicano half-son/half-father half-artist/half-writer half-wolf/half-eagle half-always/half-never. (Warrior, 115)

Gómez-Peña’s border is always a dialogic, binary articulation. Unlike Gustavo Pérez-Firmat’s ‘‘life on the hyphen’’ or Arteaga’s sign of the x, both signs of fusion, his sign seems to be the slash (/), a symbol of doubleness and juxtaposition. It is a sign of dissimilars which GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEN˜ A

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are still categorically close enough to meet at a common border (‘‘halfartist/half-writer / half-wolf/half-eagle’’) yet still be separate. GómezPeña, influenced by Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notions of ‘‘deterritorialization’’ and cultural schizophrenia, sees split existences everywhere. This penchant for duality is different from Anzaldúa’s oppressive herida abierta, which is desperate to heal and scarify into new skin. Gómez-Peña’s dialectic of difference is predicated on its two moving parts retaining some distinction, some aspect of their original, prehyphenated beginnings. For him the somewhat unsettling juxtapositions are not necessarily incompatibilities; rather, they are the somewhat awkward meetings of wary relatives from either side of the border; the voices, for example, of the ‘‘Merolico’’ (the Mexican snakeoil salesman) and the ‘‘Pachuco’’ (the street-smart urban Chicano) alternate. Gómez-Peña’s dualisms are meant to introduce to one another these distinct yet related individuals from either side of the border and thus raise their respective consciousness. But these meetings are not meant for those individuals to lose their individuality or their sense of difference. In his ‘‘bilingual performance poem’’ ‘‘Califas’’ (1987), Gómez-Peña offers a kind of Californiad, weaving together the experiences of several archetypal immigrants and Chicanos into epic form. In Canto 5 a young Chicano, Johnny, just busted by the ‘‘ethnopolice’’ simply for ‘‘cruising low / from Aztlán to Tenochtitlán / & back,’’ begins to yell at the ‘‘gringos’’ in frustration: ‘‘. . . what if 200,000 Anglosaxicans were to cross the border each month to work as gardeners, waiters musicians, movie extras bouncers, babysitters, chauffeurs, syndicated cartoons, featherweight boxers, fruit-pickers & anonymous poets? what if they were called waspanos, waspitos, wasperos or waspbacks? what if we were the top dogs? what if literature was life? what if yo were you & tú fueras I, Mister?’’ (Warrior, 71)

The police’s rough treatment of Johnny drives him not just to anger but to speculation and to poetry. This caged cruiser sings about a wish 176


for inversion. His sarcastic cri de coeur is aimed at the ruling class, challenging it to put itself in his shoes and live the life he has lived. Yet there is a wistful sense of futility to this longing for inversion, a resignation to the knowledge that he is asking the impossible. At the heart of his cry for empathy lies an apparently insurmountable language border: ‘‘what if yo were you / & tú fueras I, Mister?’’ ‘‘Yo’’ and ‘‘you’’ are tantalizingly close, only one letter distant, but still they are worlds apart. The pathos of Johnny’s dilemma comes from the futility of his wish. The differences of language, class, and worldview in his world cannot be easily resolved. Sadly the ‘‘yo’’ and ‘‘you’’ cannot transmute into each other. As a result the scene leaves Johnny a mad sage, yelling impotently from a street corner, a Vidriera-like figure emblematic of Gómez-Peña himself. Such scenes of mutual incomprehension, of incompatibility and sheer difference (call it the dark side of liminality), are what make both the poem and the performance exist. Where for Anzaldúa the binarisms are traumatic and must be fought in favor of a new understanding, for Gómez-Peña they are a symmetrical performance tool, a way to capitalize on the mechanics of incompatibility. The many dualities that pervade his work can perhaps be best reduced to the one between the performer and the viewers. The fact remains that the staged encounters with the ‘‘other’’ are staged: this border is a mobile fiction, and what lies on either side of it is too. His ‘‘border,’’ like the licenciado’s liminal madness, is a performance prop, an ironized appropriation of a familiar cultural referent. The only ‘‘real’’ border here, as his play of dualisms suggests, is the one between Gómez-Peña himself (shaman/performer) and the audience. An integral part of the manipulation of the viewer/reader of these performances comes from watching the theatrical display of the madman convincing himself of his own unusual condition (that he is made of glass, that he is a ‘‘savage’’ Guatinaui chieftain caged in a museum exhibit, that he is a ‘‘Mexican in the process of Chicanoization’’ [New World Border, 102]). He does this despite all the evidence to the contrary (like Carlos Fuentes believing his own silly notion that he is weak or Vasconcelos convincing himself of the cosmic future). In his introduction to a selection of bilingual ‘‘poetical texts’’ ‘‘Sin/translation (for Spanish to English and vice versa)’’ Gómez-Peña soothes his readers and listeners into simply suspending their incomprehension and accepting linguistic difference, in yet another of his dualisms: ‘‘note: I encourage my monolingual readers to attempt to read the texts and Spanish and Spanglish. I’m sure you will understand them’’ (Warrior, 143). The repGUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEN˜ A

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resentation of difference, which looks traumatic, is really didactic and rhetorical.8 The rhetorical hallmark of Vidriera’s brand of performance art is parrhesia—a feigned reluctance to speak candidly—taken to an extreme. His act takes this feigned unwillingness to the point of ironic self-effacement and to (supposed) transparency. When told that a great person of the court wishes to see him, Vidriera answers that he is no good at flattery and would be out of place there (Novelas, 2:121) but of course instantly agrees to go—only after being carefully packed in straw so he will not break during transport. For Gómez-Peña, parrhesia is elevated to the point of beseeching the viewer to assist him in his put-on (see Figure 14). Many of Gómez-Peña’s characters and performances attempt to draw in his audiences in a carefully calculated way. In perhaps his most famous work, The Guatinaui World Tour (1992–1993), a collaboration with Coco Fusco, he and Fusco parody the actual nineteenth-century practice of exhibiting live ‘‘savages’’ à la Hottentot Venus (see Figure 15). The couple, dressed as flamboyant ‘‘authentic primitives’’ (he as a ‘‘kind of Aztec wrestler from Las Vegas,’’ and she as a ‘‘Taina straight out of Gilligan’s Island ’’), passed themselves off as members of the nonexistent Guatinaui tribe. They exhibited themselves in a cage at various museums in the United States and Europe, where they were fed bananas, performed ‘‘indigenous rituals,’’ and were photographed with museum visitors (New World Border, 97). For a small fee the ‘‘male of the species’’ would display his genitals. The resulting video, The Couple in the Cage (1993), is not so much a record of the performance as it is a study of the crowd’s reactions to it (amazingly, many museum-goers did not realize the irony and truly believed these were actual caged natives). The result, claim the creators of the work, is ‘‘reverse ethnography,’’ in which the ignorance of the crowds becomes the spectacle.Yet when Diana Taylor asked Gómez-Peña what his ideal spectator would have done under the circumstances, he replied: ‘‘open the cage and let us out’’ (‘‘Savage Performance,’’ 169). In the performance Temple of Confessions (1994) Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes set up a quasi-religious confessional booth and asked the visitors to confess, in written or recorded form, their ‘‘intercultural fears,’’ snippets of which were incorporated into later performances. Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes took this trust in the audience a step further in The Crucifiction Project (1994), in which the two, dressed as ‘‘contemporary enemies of California’’ (one as an ‘‘undocumented ban178


FIGURE 14.

Gómez-Peña as ‘‘El

Warrior for Gringostroika’’ from the performance series The Year of the White Bear (1992). Photo courtesy Walker Art Center.

Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco as ‘‘authentic primitives’’ from the performance The Guatinaui World Tour (1992–1993). Photo courtesy Walker Art Center.

FIGURE 15.

Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes as ‘‘contem-

FIGURE 16.

dido’’ and the other a ‘‘generic gang member’’), crucified themselves in front of a crowd of three hundred at Rodeo Beach in San Francisco (see Figure 16). Attendees rePhoto by permission powerceived handouts asking them to ‘‘free us House Books. from our martyrdom as a gesture of political commitment’’ (New World Border, 102). There exists in Gómez-Peña’s work, despite its attempts to challenge ‘‘people to reflect on their attitudes towards other cultures,’’ deep complicity with the audience, a reliance on the goodness of strangers (New World Border, 104). The duality of Gómez-Peña’s own persona (‘‘My activities as cultural commentator and my performance work have always influenced each other. My theoretical voice is more balanced and logical . . . My performance voice is frantic and fractured’’ [Warrior, 16]) hints at the paradox—and the failure—at the heart of his work. It strives for the impossible goal of standardizing marginality, of inviting everyone into otherness: ‘‘today, if there is a dominant culture, it is border culture. And those who still haven’t crossed the border will do it very soon . . . As you read this text, you’re crossing a border yourself’’ (‘‘Multicultural Paradigm,’’ 19), he hurls at his readership/audience. The only way of doing this, of course, is through the carefully controlled environment of a performance.9 porary enemies of California’’ from the performance The Crucifiction Project (1994).


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The scripted performance A Seminar on Museum Race Relations has Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes (dressed in garish three-piece suits as motivational speakers ‘‘Bill’’ and ‘‘Bob’’) engaging a crowd in a mock sensitivity seminar. When it comes to the question-and-answer period, several plants in the audience ask the two men some questions meant to elicit jokey answers: Plant #3: Gwermo, can you say something in Nahuatl? GP: Ggggua . . . camole . . . Plant #2: To the alien on the left: Do you have a green card? GP: (responds in tongues) Plant #3: Hey Roberto, can you please tell us what’s the relationship between the Zapatistas, rap, L.A. gang culture, and the resurgence of Chicano nationalism? RS: No. Plant #1: Mr. Pena, I read in Artforum that you don’t want to pay child support, and that you mistreat women artistic collaborators. Is that true? GP: It must be true. Critics are always objective when they talk about my work . . . (At this point audience members feel compelled to begin to ask other insensitive questions. For some reason, it never fails.) RS: (slowly gets pissed) Come on, guys. What kind of questions are these? How about something more shocking? Let’s tell some racist jokes. Would anyone like to share a racist joke? Come on, it’s all part of the healing process. (To Gómez-Peña) Bill, you got any racist jokes? (Gómez-Peña nods) Come on everybody. Let’s encourage this man to be brave. Orale vato, give us some racist stuff! GP: Alright, alright! What do you call a Chicano baptism? . . . A bean dip! (he laughs neurotically) RS: (pissed) That’s not good enough. Come on, say something really offensive, motherfucker! Go on, say it!! GP tries to speak, but is unable to. He laughs, cries, and falls on his knees. RS grabs a knife and stands behind him in a menacing manner. He brings the knife up as if getting ready to stab him. RS: (screaming) What’s the difference between a Mexican and a Cuban, eh?! (no answer) How many Mexican artists does it take to fill up a theater like this, eh?! You pathetic stereotype! You stand-up comedian wannabe . . . (BLACKOUT) (New World Border, 158–159)

Performers, impersonating audience members, prompt the audience to imitate them in asking the ‘‘correct’’ kinds of funny, ‘‘insensitive’’ 182


questions that cross the border of good taste. And just as this airy and lighthearted spectacle begins to toy with the true unpredictability of audience response, the performers take back control. The tone breaks, and the ugly threat of conflict appears. But this conflict stops short of ‘‘crossing the line’’ into discomfort: the action has moved back onstage. At the moment when ‘‘Bob’’ starts becoming aggressive toward the crowd, he deflects his aggression upon ‘‘Bill.’’ It returns from potential actual aggression with total strangers to staged aggression. The violence that ‘‘Bob’’ was vaguely threatening to inflict on the crowd is returned to ‘‘Bill,’’ who becomes a stand-in for the crowd. We then watch the scene of abuse; and the thin membrane, the border, between the crowd and the performance is preserved. By putting bad jokes and rude questions in the mouths of ‘‘audience members,’’ Gómez-Peña has made ‘‘liminized’’ Vidrieras of all the attendees by making them spout nonsense; but by doing this in a controlled way through fictional audience members, he reinforces the division between himself—the one who is truly in command of the proceedings—and them. Likewise, when Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco pretend to be long-lost Indians and cage themselves in a living display within the walls of an actual museum, they invite the complicity of the very institutions they critique. As with all liminal acts, Gómez-Peña’s anti-institutional performance is clearly bounded by its own institutionalization: the critique is done with the museum’s blessing. The mad wanderer may pretend to travel ‘‘under no flag,’’ like the licenciado on his first trip to Italy, but he still travels by the good graces of the captain—or, in the case of Gómez-Peña, the Field Museum in Chicago or the Smithsonian Institution. This kind of doubleness, which has been read as hypocrisy by several critics, can also be read as a genuine inquiry into arbitrary difference, with the purpose of displaying how it works.10 The border both for the licenciado and for Gómez-Peña is rather imposing and seems to be fordable only by beings who are free-floating and translucent. But in fact it is fordable by beings who only appear to be free-floating and translucent; because the border itself, it turns out, is arbitrary and constructed for aesthetic, and didactic, purposes. Gómez-Peña and the licenciado Vidriera offer two different possible outcomes to falsifying liminality and uncovering the myths of privileged knowledge and of invisibility to the public. The licenciado returns from his false liminality at the end of the story when he is ‘‘cured’’ by a Hieronymite monk, an expert in making mutes speak who instead silences the licenciado. Tomás Rodaja, no longer ‘‘Vidriera,’’ now goes GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEN˜ A

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by the name of ‘‘Rueda’’ [wheel or round] and has indeed gone full circle. He repeats his trip to Italy, but he is now fully committed to the world and to a flag. He dies abroad with honor and in silence. ‘‘He has found his way back to himself, to his community, and to his body . . . and his prudent death for his country is, oddly enough, the first wise act of his life’’ (Forcione, 316). This return might indeed be wise in the conventional sense, but it is not wise in the foolish, liminal way. Gómez-Peña, however, has no plans to return to the anonymity and silence of the church pulpit of his first performance, for, as he says: ‘‘I firmly believe that . . . the role that art and education can perform is crucial and irreplaceable’’ (New World Border, 109). We can read the story of the licenciado Vidriera’s ironic, unwise madman (with his unfunny jabs, his mean-spirited and obscure jokes) as a curious variant of the picaresque, one with a surprise ending: instead of confessing unapologetically for his life, like Lazarillo de Tormes, the ‘‘pícaro’’ licenciado dies without ever accounting for his life—a clear distinction from the typical obsessively storytelling pícaro. This subaltern truly cannot speak anymore, unlike his picaresque brethren, who confess in the first person and in full color.Yet, like Lazarillo or Guzmán de Alfarache or Perico, Tomás is also a traveler and a huckster. And his final confidence job is the role of holy fool; when he is ‘‘cured’’ of this madness, his only recourse is to re-engage with the world, to become legitimate and die a socially redeeming death in battle. This represents a real danger in leaving this liminal, picaresque world of the confidence-job and the performance put-on and returning to the real world. One can wind up in the middle of a very real war, just like the cruiser Johnny, who ‘‘left prison to become a poet / but instead / they sent him to Vietnam’’ (Warrior, 71). Thus we can also see the mock-holy fool licenciado as the discoverer, perhaps by accident, of one of the last spaces in which a holy fool–ascritic can thrive within the rationalist modernity that Foucault says became so hostile to madness: the space of self-conscious performance. Madness no longer has a place, so it must be invented and counterfeited and performed. This inverted madness has evolved in one important way between Vidriera and his heir Gómez-Peña. Vidriera’s folly ends in tragedy and silence. When Vidriera chooses to step away from his performance of madness, he retreats into conventionality and dies with honor but in oblivion, since no one listens to the sane. Because of the lessons of this tragic withdrawal, Gómez-Peña chooses instead to collude with 184


his audience. Under the guise of a challenge, he constantly invites his viewers into the frame narrative of his performance because, unlike Vidriera, he will not excuse himself from the limelight. Rather, he will invite all those who watch to continue crossing over with him (or at least to assist him in his own crossing), thus extending his performances without pause until his next crossing project—and thus extending his liminality perpetually, as Bernal Díaz wished desperately to do. The finale of one of his performances recalls the envoi at the end of a fanciful Baroque masque in its direct address to the audience: I go back to the city to think of a better text to put into practice thank you, my other selves, my other voices for traveling with me tonight. [I blow out the candles] FIN (Warrior, 123)

This is Gómez-Peña’s alternative to the licenciado’s sad reentry into society from his false liminality. Gómez-Peña instead thanks his audience for having allowed him his false liminality, for colluding with him and allowing him to remain in this space by remaining his accomplices.


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CONCLUSION

General Santa Anna’s Leg and Other Failings

First there was error, then the death occurred, and now an eternal insight into the rocky barrenness of the human predicament prevails. —PAUL DE MAN (BLINDNESS, 225)

¡De tu caduco ser das mustias señas con que con docta muerte y necia vida viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas! —SOR JUANA, ‘‘ROSA DIVINA’’ (OBRAS, 1 : 278)

[Your withering brings mortality’s reply. Wherefore with thoughtless life and thoughtful death, In dying you speak true, in life you lie!] —(TRUEBLOOD TRANSLATION, 99)

We come to the end of our consideration of Mexico’s historical ‘‘pillars of our being,’’ a sweep of nearly five hundred years. We have focused on the figures who have come to represent those ‘‘pillars’’ and have seen a pattern emerge among these representatives: first they are surprised by failure, but then this surprise yields knowledge. This is true for most of the cases we have studied; but the two most recent, Fuentes and Gómez-Peña, are slightly different. Bound up in postmodernity’s penchant for irony and rhetorical self-awareness, neither of them is overcome by failure—at least not in the same epiphanic and redemptive sense as the others—and indeed they might not even be genuine ‘‘failures’’ (Fuentes for one is quite clearly a success). Yet both are keenly aware of, and even court, failure. Theirs is a performance of failure, in that they both profit from the representation of it. This is perhaps possible because of the particular historical and aesthetic conditions of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, a self-reflexive stage of culture in what Northrop Frye would call the ‘‘mythos of winter’’ (Anatomy, 223–239): failure has perhaps reached such a recogniz-

able form and pattern that can be simulated and even manipulated. Fuentes and Gómez-Peña, having learned well from history, embody the form of failure, even if they do not actually suffer from it (and perhaps, as Paz insists that Mexicans ‘‘profesamos [amor] a la forma’’ [we profess love for form], these two Mexicans have applied that love to failure [Laberinto, 29]).1 In terms of the gainful employment of failure, one could also point to the recent example of the monolithic PRI, which after losing the presidency for the first time in seventy years (some would say it merely yielded it temporarily) lately has been staging a well-calculated comeback.2 The border (Gómez-Peña’s emblem)—the national monument corresponding to the most recent of the historical ‘‘pillars of our being,’’ the diaspora of the last fifty years—is an apt sign for this late-stage use of failure. The border is liminality embodied. It is literally a threshold that, once crossed, changes the crossers forever. In good postmodern fashion it also subverts the usual function of monuments. They are normally built by a state in order to recall and mythologize an event, a person, or a field of honor. But the border is an unplanned monument, a constant reminder of a painful historical process that is ongoing. It is also a working part of this continuing event. The ‘‘fence and the river’’ (as Claire Fox poetically refers to it) is the physical line that is constantly breached and stands at once for containment and porosity. It is both a negative and a positive monument: a negative testament to the national failures of the Mexican economy and the U.S. police state, but also a positive one to countless migrants and to the culture they are transforming with their odyssey. Because of this polyvalence, it is an open symbol. But the border is also, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s terms, an herida abierta [open wound] (Borderlands, 3), a definition that applies to all the sore points of Mexican history, the rest of the historical landmarks we have considered: the Conquest, Independence, and the Revolution. All are hobbled victories, Fuentes’s ‘‘crushing defeats’’ leaving wounds that have in turn left monuments that are themselves maimed. In the middle of modern Mexican history we find a famous literal wound belonging to the most pernicious military caudillo of the new nation, Antonio López de Santa Anna (1791–1876), known as ‘‘benemérito de la patria’’ [well-deserving of the fatherland]. Santa Anna presided over one of the most resounding failures in Mexican history, the loss of half the Mexican territory to the United States in 1846–1848. Lesley Byrd Simpson’s CONCLUSION: GENERAL SANTA ANNA’S LEG

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classic précis of Mexican history, Many Mexicos (1941), offers a caustic portrait of Santa Anna as a histrionic megalomaniac who nearly lost his life to the invading French in 1838: Santa Anna against the King of France! A good match . . . At that moment, the god of luck took him by the hand and led him onto the path of a French cannonball. His left leg was shattered below the knee. Never would the fatherland be allowed to forget Santa Anna’s leg. The death that the hero expected momentarily resembled that of a romantic opera star, who manages to sing lustily while his life blood flows in a red torrent. In his carefully arranged deathbed the wounded hero lay, while strong men wept unashamed, but his agony did not prevent him from dictating a fifteen-page last message to his beloved fellow-citizens. (244–245)

Despite his dramatic almost-martyrdom, Santa Anna lived long enough to lose to the North Americans and their Manifest Destiny. The heroic leg, however, was buried with military honors in an elaborate cenotaph during a ceremony attended by ministers, the diplomatic corps, and the cadets of Chapultepec. Beyond being a constant reminder of his unquestionable patriotism, Santa Anna’s dead leg became his motivation, his identity, and sometimes his excuse (his status as an ‘‘invalid’’ exempted him from calamities like exile, execution, and being made president by the wrong faction). Santa Anna grew into his missing leg. Arguably, it contributed to the dismemberment of the nation itself, which after the ‘‘disaster of 1848 . . . destroyed the last vestige of national unity,’’ resulting in the ‘‘Many Mexicos’’ of Simpson’s title and what Fuentes calls the ‘‘TTT,’’ the ‘‘Tremendous Texas Trauma’’ (Simpson, Many Mexicos, 253; Fuentes, Myself, 15). This is an unusual vision of a national figure: a legless dictator, a disabled father, a caudillo with failings. Yet this vision is persistent and has deep consequences for Mexican culture, as I have pointed out. The failings are not necessarily just injuries; they can also afford certain privileges, just as Santa Anna was both diminished and given his authority by his missing leg. Failures can have their use. The psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham explores what for Freud are the failures of mourning by referring to amputees. The subject, literally diminished by his or her personal loss, must make great effort to compensate for the absence and must now expand the ego in order to account for that loss. The amputee becomes a reflexive self-historian, since his or her body has become a literal transcription of the trauma. All of this makes 188


the sufferer a living ‘‘crypt’’ (in Abraham’s usage), who because of this is afforded Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, the retroactive meaningfulness or belated significance obvious only after the event is over (Abraham and Torok, L’écorce, 396–400). This defining, retroactive consciousness can take many forms, as we have seen: it can result in costly self-fashioning, like Santa Anna and his leg; in heartbreak, like the criollo class that fears true change in El Periquillo; in tragicomedy, like Vasconcelos’s dramatic failure to emulate Madero; in outright comedy, like Fuentes, hyperaware of his phantom ulcers; and finally in didacticism, like Gómez-Peña, for whom ‘‘something broke inside’’ and who then turns this ‘‘rupture’’ into a lesson (Warrior, 20). Such are the uses of failure. Once the recognition of failure happens and the fall into knowledge occurs, mourning is sure to follow: mourning for a time before the fall. In his study of recent fiction from Latin America, Idelber Avelar observes that mourning is unusual because—in contrast to the Marxist formulation—it ‘‘does not deal with use values. There is no ‘use’ for an epitaph or a memorial . . . What is most proper to mourning is to resist its own accomplishment, to oppose its own conclusion: ‘this is what mourning is, the history of its refusal’ ’’ (this quotation is from Derrida) (Untimely Present, 4–5). Indeed mourning is defined by what is not and in pragmatic terms has no use, because on some level what is important is irretrievably lost. Avelar uses this insight to explore a ‘‘topology of defeat’’ in the aftermath of the Latin American dictatorships and ‘‘dirty wars’’ of the 1970s and 1980s. This ‘‘post-dictatorial’’ landscape is haunted by all sorts of missing bodies—los desaparecidos [the missing], the deposed and legitimate heads of state like Salvador Allende, the never-found bounty of neoliberalism, and ultimately the disappearance of literature itself—where the evidence (the physical remains) has vanished or is never returned to the bereaved who try to make sense of it. Mourning is predicated on the impossibility of returning to the way things were before the object vanished, the same principle behind elegy. It is all posteriority and all hindsight, much like nostalgia, and both are centered on the aftermath. Both tasks, in contradiction to the announced wishes for a return to the lost object, paradoxically resist such a return or a restitution. This is because that would mark an end to the mourning, to the very process of missing, and to the heightened state of awareness it initiated. The process of ‘‘heuristic’’ failure that I have outlined offers a variant to this traumatic model of loss and mourning: here there is a use CONCLUSION: GENERAL SANTA ANNA’S LEG

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value to the memorials: Santa Anna’s leg found its purpose, devastating as that was. In all of the cases we have seen that the event is conflated with the aftermath, and the death is only partial. Parts go missing and selves become damaged, but awareness begins. When the subject itself being mourned survives, the result is somewhat different than when the subject disappears totally. This result may be disastrous, but it is not final. The kind of mourning that I have isolated here is not an ending but rather a rite of passage—the process of crossing the border. Those who emerge at the other side are very different, still alive but sometimes maimed or in distress (like the ailing Fuentes, the aging and angry Bernal Díaz, the regretful Periquillo, the humbled Humboldt, the broken Gómez-Peña). Therefore the mourning is for a partial survival and produces a sort of survivor guilt. The regret is for something not entirely gone, for having outlived the death. These are failed deaths, like Santa Anna’s, and this partiality can still be crippling, especially to the nation. These types of successes threaded with failure run deep in the Mexican national imagination, in the collective memory. They are an integral part of the national narrative. And as such these failures have been granted their memorials and their monuments. Given that they are memorials to the still living (like Santa Anna’s cenotaph), however, the normal distinction between memorials and what they commemorate is complicated. As monuments they are suspect, like the shaky equestrian statue of King Charles that Humboldt observed in the Great Plaza. Each of the figures we have considered is himself a national cornerstone, a central and defining statue holding a prominent place in the pantheon of Mexican culture (except for Gómez-Peña—at least not yet). Mexican culture relies on them for its sense of continuity and identity. Yet when we look at them we find that they are conflicted monuments, shaky because of their brushes with and their survival of failure. These figures prove that it is possible for shortcomings to play a part in the relationship between national symbols and the nation they represent; failure can become an element of the metonymic relationship between the ‘‘pillars’’ of a culture and the collective imaginary that gave them the title of ‘‘beneméritos’’ [well-deserving]. The relationship between the figurehead and the nation can be grounded, astoundingly, on failure instead of on victory. We find a case of the ‘‘King’s two bodies,’’ where the land and the figurehead are one, in Juan Rulfo’s classic portrait of a regional caudi-

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llo, Pedro Páramo (1955). When Pedro is overtaken by his obsessions, the countryside and its people are laid waste. His principal obsession is for Susana San Juan, whom Pedro can never possess because she is mad (when the townsfolk unwittingly turn the cackling madwoman’s funeral into a carnival, Pedro’s wrath kills off the entire region of Comala). Susana’s madness itself began because of the failures of her own father, who once lowered her down an old mineshaft: —¡Dame lo que está allí, Susana! Y ella agarró la calavera entre sus manos y cuando la luz le dio de llena ella la soltó. —Es una calavera de muerto—dijo. —Debes encontrar algo junto a ella. Dame todo lo que encuentres. El cadáver se deshizo en canillas; la quijada se desprendió como si fuera de azúcar. Le fue dando pedazo a pedazo hasta que llegó a los dedos de los pies y le entregó coyuntura tras coyuntura. Y la calavera primero; aquella bola redonda que se deshizo entre sus manos. —Busca algo más, Susana. Dinero. Ruedas redondas de oro. Búscalas, Susana. Entonces ella no supo de ella, sino muchos días después entre el hielo, entre las miradas llenas de hielo de su padre. Por eso reía ahora. —Supe que eras tú, Bartolomé. (160–161) [‘‘Give me what is down there, Susana!’’ She held the skull with her hands and when the light fell on it she let it drop. ‘‘It’s a dead man’s skull,’’ she said. ‘‘You need to find something next to it. Give me everything you find.’’ The bones of the body fell apart; the jaw fell off as if it were candy. She handed him piece by piece until she got to the toes and gave those to him joint by joint. The skull had been first; that globe that fell apart in her hands. ‘‘Look for something else, Susana. Money. Round things made of gold. Look for them, Susana.’’ Then she fell unconscious, until many days later, to the ice, the icy stare of her father. This is why she now laughed. ‘‘I knew it was you, Bartolomé.’’]

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This is a scene of both ritual passage and knowledge. Suggestions of incest and unwanted penetration accompany Susana’s transformation from innocent child to madwoman. It is a harrowing process during which she loses, among other things, her consciousness. But when she comes to, she returns in a heightened state of awareness, knowing her father to an inappropriate degree: ‘‘supe que eras tú, Bartolomé’’ [I knew it was you, Bartolomé]. From then on, she addresses him not just with the familiar ‘‘tú’’ but also by his given name, Bartolomé, as a wife would a husband, and people start to think that she is in fact his young wife. Her trauma, a result of his abusiveness and greed, has given her an unusual degree of both proximity and clarity. She now sees exactly the kind of failed father he is, as impoverished as the dead body in the mine. But this clarity comes at a price: her innocence and sanity. Yet these losses, even if they are crippling, are not mortal; and her lost awareness is only temporary: she returns knowing, perhaps too much. This is like de Man’s dédoublement, the sudden escape that happens when one trips and is forced to reconsider one’s concept of oneself and one’s circumstances (Blindness, 211–215). Susana survives as a very changed person burdened by a knowledge for which she never bargained. In the insight gained through failure there is a ratio between the one and the many. Susana San Juan’s madness, through its effect on the powerful caudillo whom she in turn haunts, ends up affecting their entire world. What does it mean to have humbling and potentially dangerous failures thread their way into the collective psyche and into its monuments? Although frank acknowledgment of failure would seem to run counter to the intentional forgetting that Renan says is necessary to create a nation, it is not. An awareness of failures can have just as powerful an effect as their suppression. Failures can figure just as importantly into the metonymical relationship between emblematic figures and the imagined communities who need them as emblems: failures offer grounding. Abraham develops the notion of the ‘‘phantom,’’ observing that traumas can become legacies that haunt the descendants who did not actually experience them; ‘‘what comes back to haunt them are the tombs of others’’ (Abraham and Torok, Shell, 172)— as indeed Santa Anna’s leg has haunted Mexico, probably more than it haunted him. Being haunted by the failures of the patriarchs is a burden, to be sure; but it gives those haunted descendants a continuity, a shared ground—even if it is an empty tomb—on which to stake the imagined community. Comala, as critics have noted, is more alive as a town full of ghosts than it ever was before. 192


Finally, in this process of failure I have attempted to articulate there is also a ratio of awareness to pain, of damage to knowledge. But the hope persists for a net positive result to the pain of failure, for a net yield of usefulness. Recall Sor Juana’s defiant ‘‘Respuesta a Sor Filotea,’’ where she passionately argues for her right to lead the life of the mind: recounting her lonely self-instruction without the benefits of a formal education reserved for men, she tells how she tried to relinquish the trappings of womanhood. Whenever she failed to teach herself a lesson, she would cut off locks of her beautiful hair, ‘‘el adorno natural . . . de las mujeres—y más en tan florida juventud’’ [the natural adornment . . . of women, but especially of those in the flower of youth] (Obras, 4:446). The loss of one’s constituent parts, like physical falls and open wounds, can prove to be an instrument of knowledge.

CONCLUSION: GENERAL SANTA ANNA’S LEG

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Where no page number is given for an English version throughout, the translation is mine. 2. Fuentes makes a strong case for including the Mexican-American War of 1846– 1848 as the negatively definitive moment in Mexican history, calling it the ‘‘Tremendous Texas Trauma’’ (Myself, 15). This list could be expanded to include more recent events: the failure of the 1960s student movement, ending in the bloody 1968 Massacre of Tlatelolco; the economic reforms of the last twenty-five years that have created a mass exodus to the United States; and the peasant revolts of the 1990s in Chiapas, whose leader, the semiotician-turned-subcomandante Marcos, has used the media to transform the resounding Zapatista military failure into a quasi-victory. In addition, the recent presidential victory of the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) over the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is also proving to be short-lived. 3. For an interesting speculation about the relationship between modernity and failure by a major intellectual figure of the Mexican Left, see José Revueltas, ‘‘La lucha contra el fracaso’’ (159–162). 4. Anderson writes in the tradition of sociologically inclined critics like Walter Benjamin, Ian Watt, and Raymond Williams, linking the rise of print capitalism to the rise of the modern nation-state. He locates the origin of nationalism within the Industrial Revolution and argues that literacy and the wide dissemination of the ideas facilitated by mechanical reproduction built ‘‘imagined communities’’ of likeminded individuals who were held together by a common language as well as by the knowledge of simultaneous acts of reading (Imagined Communities, 35). The key element in the new nations’ sense of themselves lies in their citizens’ belief in the perpetuity of the collective act—if any one individual dies, the rest will continue reading in community, every day, ad infinitum. According to Anderson, the rise of the nineteenth-century novel is symptomatic of this sea-change from ‘‘messianic’’ to ‘‘empty’’ time (he coincidentally offers Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento as one of his test cases). The novel provides a ‘‘tour d’horizon’’ quite different from the ‘‘tour du monde’’ that previous literary forms like the epic or the Bible had provided (30). The novel instead offers a world where

‘‘the horizon is clearly bounded: it is that of colonial Mexico . . . [It] conjures up a space full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness of this colony’’ (30). The realist novel offers typification, the comfort of an itinerary, and an imposition of a manageable subjective scale (what Gérard Genette might call focalisation). It offers the notion that a single witness can see enough of the world to satisfy and engage an entire community but also the idea that a text can act metonymically, one for the whole, like the reader of the newspaper who confidently believes herself to be part of the imagined community of countless other readers. 5. Addressing the particularly difficult question of the place of Latin America within modernity, Néstor García Canclini sees a paradox: ‘‘Why will we worry about postmodernity when, on our continent, modern advances have advanced neither entirely nor to everyone?’’ (Culturas, 20); or, more bluntly, as Roger Bartra put it to Raymond L. Williams: ‘‘we here in Mexico keep struggling to reach modernity, and there you are in the United States worrying about postmodernity’’ (Postmodernidades, 42). Carlos Alonso has also written about this conflicted relationship in The Burden of Modernity. 6. This inward-looking essentialist discourse, which blends national pride with a self-critical stance, dominated the Mexican intellectual scene roughly from the 1920s on. It sought to distill ‘‘Mexicanness’’ or the ‘‘Mexican character’’ and became the core of the key cultural institutions and products of the period, informing the work of the Mexican muralists (Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros) and novelists like Agustín Yáñez and guiding state-sponsored interest in folk and indigenous culture, an interest which culminated in the creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the Centro Indigenista. The reading list of ‘‘mexicanidad’’ is long and distinguished, often blurring the disciplinary lines between philosophy, literature, history, sociology, and what we now call cultural criticism (for more detailed studies, see Stabb, In Quest of Identity; and Schmidt, The Roots of Lo Mexicano). It has its classics, like Visión de Anáhuac (1923) by Alfonso Reyes and Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1934) by Samuel Ramos; its liturgy, Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950); its philosophy, by Antonio Caso, Alfonso Zea, and Jorge Portilla; its parodies, like the one contained in Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958); and, most recently, its postmodern reconsiderations, like Bartra’s La jaula de la melancolía (1987) and the work of Carlos Monsiváis. (It even has uncovered a few undiscovered gems like Picardía mexicana [1960], a wonderful compilation of Mexican rudeness.) 7. The specter of methodological breakdown lurks in García Canclini’s methodological proposal as well—he toys with what amounts to a dangerous epistemological endgame. If taken to its logical conclusion, his call for the breakdown of existing methods could prove self-defeating, an aspect shared, probably unintentionally, with a certain strains of deconstruction. As with deconstruction, however, this

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instability is intentional, since it is precisely the threat of instability that GarcíaCanclini hopes will drive the new analysis. 8. For a treatment of the culture of failure in Latin American political thought, see Carlos Alberto Montaner’s La agonía de América. 9. One notable example is the attempt by the conservative nineteenth-century historian Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) to rescue the historical figure of Hernán Cortés and to dismiss the leyenda negra; Alamán did this in order to find a way to retain a link to Spain after the rejection of Independence, like his contemporary Andrés Bello in his Gramática. 10. For the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘‘Dispute of America,’’ see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World; Harold Davis addresses the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Latin American Thought (97–111, 137–139). 11. The problem of Paz’s analysis is a problem of modernity: the strategy of El laberinto is to claim the main symptom of Western industrialized modernity—the alienation of the individual in the face of a history which changes too rapidly—for Mexico. Although the Mexican version of individual alienation does not result directly from material and technological advancements, as is the case for the industrialized West, the two forms of alienation are analogous. Paz also incorporates Mexico in modernity via the aesthetics of modernism: one of the cornerstones of modernist aesthetics—different from but still a symptom of modernity—is its attraction to the mythic and the ‘‘primitive,’’ an approach he develops in greater depth in Los hijos del limo (1974). El laberinto can be read as a product of the same modernist sensibility as André Breton’s surrealist manifestos, as both seek the ‘‘primitive’’ in their midst. Its spirit is akin to the one which led Antonin Artaud, after announcing that Paris had exhausted itself as a source, to depart for the Mexican mountains in order to participate in atavistic indigenous rituals. El laberinto is Paz’s declaration that Mexico’s atavism and its deep ambivalence toward modernity made it exactly the kind of place about which modernists like Artaud had been dreaming. This issue of how a ‘‘third world’’ nation fits into modernity is profound and ongoing (see Alonso, The Burden of Modernity). 12. A curious example of this is the defeat of 1846–1848, during which the U.S. army stormed the Presidential Palace of Chapultepec and martyred several unarmed teenaged cadets who were defending the flag. The death of these secular saints, the ‘‘Niños Héroes,’’ is celebrated annually and seems to thrive on the fact that the sacrifice was patently, almost gloriously, in vain: Mexico surrendered one-third of its territory; Mexico City was occupied; its government was captured. 13. Both El laberinto and Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952) explore people caught in the margins of Western history, Mexicans and Caribbean blacks, respectively. Fanon, a great analyst of the effects and after-effects of colonialism, believed that the mind of the colonized is trapped by an impossible task: to become the mind of the colonizer. On several levels, Peau noire, masques blancs and El laberinto de la soledad share a kinship visible in their wryly stoic tone


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and in their unwillingness to offer easy solutions. Neither book is a utopian text. Most significantly, both conclude that the postcolonial psyche (for a lack of a better term) is rent in two. Fanon writes: ‘‘The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man’’ (Black Skin, 20). 14. In Postdata (1969), Paz continues blending the language of religious ritual with his observations on the Mexican condition, but in this case he concentrates on politics. According to Paz, Mexican power is epitomized by a fusion of the tlatoani (the Aztec god-king) with the caudillo (the Hispano-Arabic strongman-patriarch): ‘‘el caudillo es personalista, épico y excepcional . . . el tlatoani es impersonal, sacerdotal e institucional’’ [the caudillo is selfish, epic, and exceptional . . . the tlatoani is impersonal, priestly, and institutional] (136). Two recent and influential Mexican cultural critics from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, Enrique Krauze and Roger Bartra, have rearticulated the familiar observation that the history of Mexican power is essentially a theistic history in which the lines between the secular and the divine have been blurred (see Krauze’s Mexico: A Biography of Power, 11–24). The mixture of the sacred and the profane in the rituals of authority leads Bartra to view the Mexican bureaucratic class as the double of, and replacement for, the Catholic church, complete with rituals, penances, and counterintuitively blind faith in what he calls the ‘‘santo oficio Mexicano’’ (Oficio, 32). All of this agrees with Benedict Anderson’s observation that modern ‘‘nationalist imagining . . . suggests a strong affinity with the religious imagining’’ (Imagined Communities, 10). 15. Originally set forth in Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites de passage (1909), this concept has found many resonances in subsequent literary theories, including Mikhail Bakhtin’s readings of François Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes, studies of symbolic modes by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘‘margins.’’ In the Hispanic history of ideas, we see the inheritance of this concept in Fernando Ortiz’s notions of ‘‘transculturación,’’ in Paz (besides El laberinto also evident in Lévi-Strauss o el festín de Esopo [1967]), in Severo Sarduy’s Barroco (1974), and in Fuentes’s piecemeal appropriations of Bakhtin. More recently Gustavo Pérez Firmat, in his Literature and Liminality (1986), offers a carnivalesque reading of Don Juan Tenorio and other Hispanic texts. 16. The Historia verdadera is one of the earliest examples of the attempt to negotiate an American sensibility and identity different from that of Europe, as Alfonso Reyes notes (Obras, 11:83–84). 17. Angel Rama in La ciudad letrada, Enrique Krauze in Mexico: A Biography of Power, Paz in Postdata, and Roberto González Echevarría in The Voice of the Masters are among some of the most notable. 18. Feminist readers have observed that the three male characters hold three different but equally reductive views of women. The old man sees either asexual mothers or whores; Agustín sees cinematic clichés; and Plutarco sees only absences, empty spaces that are neutral and faded. For M. E. Valdés, Fuentes’s ‘‘feminophobia is only incidentally about sex differences and fundamentally about power: power

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of authority, of force, of money, of domination of the other through any and every means available’’ (‘‘Fuentes,’’ 230). In this view, Plutarco’s struggle to find a woman to mourn is really a veiled struggle to find a woman to misrepresent and thus to dominate. Valdés and Gloria Durán have both argued that Fuentes’s representation of women tends to favor often unfair formalized archetypes. 19. ‘‘A patient repeats . . . instead of remembering . . . [He] in fact . . . acts out’’ (Freud, Complete Psychological Works, 12:151).

CHAPTER 1 1. For the most complete biography of Bernal, see Herbert Cerwin, Bernal Díaz, 116–155. 2. Roberto González Echevarría reminds us that ‘‘conventional literary history veils the fact that many of the chronicles of discovery and conquest were relaciones. There is hardly a text more like Lazarillo or Guzmán than Bernal’’ (Celestina’s Brood, 56). 3. Chapter and page numbers refer to the ‘‘Guatemala’’ manuscript of the Historia verdadera reproduced in the right-hand column of Father Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María’s indispensable parallel text of both the ‘‘Guatemala’’ manuscript and the published ‘‘Mercedarian’’ edition of 1632 (1982), except where noted. Although Sáenz argues that the Guatemala is an unreliable rough draft for the later Mercedarian edition, I favor the Guatemala in my textual analysis in most cases. English translations are from the only complete English version of the Guatemala manuscript, the Maudslay edition of 1908. For further textual matters, see also Sáenz de Santa María’s comprehensive Introducción crítica and his Historia de una historia. Regarding the legal nature of the Historia verdadera, see Ramón Iglesia, ‘‘Two Studies,’’ 75–76. 4. Where page numbers are given for the English translations of Gómara, these are from Lesley Byrd Simpson’s abbreviated version Cortés; otherwise they are mine. 5. Although Cortés’s letters are not without distorting agendas (he was at once attempting to curry favor, discredit his immediate rival—Diego Velázquez, the governor of Cuba—and aggrandize his own feats), there appears to be no deliberate reason for altering his chronology of events. See Rolena Adorno, ‘‘Discourses on Colonialism’’; and Francis Brooks, ‘‘Moctezuma.’’ 6. For further discussion on geography as an organizing principle in Gómara, see Robert Lewis, ‘‘Humanistic Historiography,’’ 84. 7. The later Mercedarian edition attempted to tone down this democratic impulse: at a crucial battle in Chapter 128 the phrase from the Guatemala edition ‘‘y todos los soldados poníamos grandes ánimo a Cortés para pelear’’ (286; my emphasis) [and all of us soldiers greatly inspirited Cortés to fight] (2:252) becomes in the Mercedarian ‘‘y todos los soldados poníamos grandes ánimos para pelear’’ [and all of us soldiers were greatly inspirited]. For variances between the two texts, it is instructive to


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consult the side-by-side edition prepared by Father Sáenz de Santa María. For a theoretical discussion of the mechanics of collective voice at work in Bernal’s writing, see José María Rodríguez García, ‘‘From the Communal ‘We’ to the Individual ‘I.’ ’’ 8. Historians Antonio de Solís and William Hickling Prescott built upon this judgment. It generated some admiration by celebrants of the archetypically Spanish casticismo, like Miguel de Unamuno, who discovered Bernal late in life and wrote admiringly about his rustic style: ‘‘Pocos libros, si es que alguno hay en castellano, de una lengua más viva, más enjuta, más hablada’’ (Obras, 3:1028) [There are few books in Spanish, if any, that have a language more alive, more lean, more spoken]. The commonplace of a Bernal/Gómara dichotomy, though questioned somewhat by Ramón Iglesia in the 1930s, is still found in recent criticism on the Historia verdadera: for instance, by Leónidas Emilfork Tobar (La conquista, 23–56) and Margo Glantz. Glantz even weaves the distinction into her thematics, arguing that Bernal’s messy erasures make him distinct from Gómara: ‘‘Borrón es una marca que separa a Bernal del ilustre Gómara; la verdad es imborrable, ha dejado señas indelebles . . . [en] inscripciones corporales’’ (Borrones, 21) [Erasure is the mark which separates Bernal from the educated Gómara; truth is unerasable and has left indelible marks . . . (in) corporeal inscriptions]. 9. Ironically enough, as Lesley Byrd Simpson points out, Gómara’s own stylistic ideal consists of a highly controlled simplicity with ‘‘sprinklings of homely and apposite Castilian proverbs’’ (‘‘Introduction,’’ xxv). Gómara himself writes in his prologue that his goal is to write in a plain, vernacular ‘‘romance,’’ that is ‘‘llano y cual ahora usan’’ (1:39) [plain and such as is now current] (5). This, if we allow for the patronizing irony, could well describe Bernal’s style. On this topic, see González Echevarría, Isla a su vuelo (16–25) and Emilfork Tobar, La conquista (32). 10. ‘‘[Cortés] enbió dos soldados como indios, puestas [mantas como indios proprios] . . . e como eran morenos . . . que no paresçían españoles’’ (246) [They sent two soldiers disguised like Indians with Indian clothes . . . as they were dark complexioned and did not look like Spaniards] (2:177–178). 11. On the topic of hidden correspondences, Rolena Adorno addresses a different aspect of the hidden sympathy between Gómara and Bernal: she argues that the attacks on Gómara are unwarranted, since Gómara more or less agrees with Bernal’s claim that the conquerors and their accomplishments were great and that they richly deserve their encomiendas. She contends that Bernal could not directly attack the influential Bartolomé de las Casas, his true enemy, who led the charge against the system of encomienda, and instead attacks Gómara as a sort of stand-in (‘‘Discourses on Colonialism’’). 12. Passages like these have led some historians to speculate that Bernal was an outright fraud who did not really participate in the Conquest or at least in as much of it as he claims (see Brooks, ‘‘Moctezuma Xocoyotl’’). The veracity of historical facts, however, does not affect the Oedipal struggle at hand. 13. This is usually associated with a discussion of Bernal’s plain, unadorned writing and his deviation from the norms of Renaissance historiography, both as creative

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acts. As Verónica Cortínez writes, ‘‘la Historia verdadera sobrepasa los parámetros del género y se convierte en una crónica anómala, extraña, original’’ [the Historia verdadera overcomes the parameters of the genre and becomes a strange, original, anomalous chronicle] (Memoria original, 300; see also Fuentes, Valiente mundo nuevo, and Anthony Cascardi, ‘‘Chronicle toward Novel,’’ for recent examples of this line of argument). Many critics have contended that because of this fictionalizing impulse Bernal is a source of modern Latin American fiction. 14. Literary imitation and borrowing was a universal practice; Gómara himself borrowed extensively from Motolinía’s Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España (1541), from Peter Mártyr’s Decades, from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and from various relaciones, such as Andrés de Tapia’s and Pedro de Alvarado’s; see Lewis, ‘‘Humanistic Historiography,’’ 109–119. On imitation, see Thomas Greene’s masterful Light in Troy. For a treatment of Gómara’s own models and influences, see Lewis, ‘‘Humanistic Historiography,’’ 68–82. 15. As Glantz puts it, ‘‘además de los indios, ha aparecido una especie intermedia, la de los indianos, también colonizada’’ [besides the Indians, an intermediate class appeared, also colonized: the indianos] or old conquistadores (Borrones, 21). A compendious historical overview is Robert Himmerich y Valencia’s The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555. 16. Victor Turner claims that while certain marginal individuals and groups— cloistered monks, court jesters, some ethnic minorities—exist in a perpetual liminality, ‘‘potentially or ideally extensible to the rest of humanity,’’ in reality, ‘‘of course, the impetus becomes itself an institution among other institutions—often more fanatical and militant than the rest’’: this fittingly describes the angry and embattled old encomenderos (Ritual Process, 112). 17. I follow Ramón Iglesia, who speculates that the ‘‘Introduction’’ was written last (‘‘Two Studies,’’ 67–68). 18. Stephen Gilman claims that Bernal struggles with ‘‘how to tell the new with old words’’ and resorts to imagery from popular fiction to convey the indescribable wonders of Tenochtitlán (‘‘Bernal del Castillo,’’ 100). Tzvetan Todorov contends that the Spaniards’ defeat of the other was first of all a victory of language and signification, of understanding in order to destroy (Conquest of America, 98–123, 187–218). In a similar vein, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Bernal is blind to the ‘‘homologies’’ between what he sees of Aztec culture and his own culture: Bernal sees high temples, a devout populace with a rite of holy blood, a pantheon of deities, and symbolic, cannibalistic sacrifice in deference to those deities (Marvelous Possessions, 119–151). Even though Bernal notes surface similarities—the priests are dressed in flowing black robes like ‘‘Dominicans,’’ the temples are not unlike the most beautiful churches in Spain—he refuses to expand on the similarities between Aztec culture and his own. For Greenblatt, this refusal is the only way of completely conquering the ‘‘other’’: maintaining the sheer strangeness of the Aztecs—what Greenblatt terms ‘‘wonder’’—is necessary so that the Spaniards can fathom annihilation. While this is an intriguing possibility, Greenblatt does not take into account an


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important environmental factor: the Spanish psyche was well used to having a ‘‘homologous’’ infidel ‘‘other’’ as an enemy. Maintaining the infidel’s strangeness was not an unusual act of will or imagination but in fact an ingrained habit. The Moors had only been ejected from Granada in 1492, and Bernal himself cannot refrain from putting cries of ‘‘Allah!’’ in the mouths of the attacking Aztecs. Other historians, like Brooks, see the justification for waging total war in Bernal’s condemnation of the Aztecs’ vices of homosexuality, cannibalism, and paganism; in this, however, Bernal merely echoes Gómara as well as other printed sources. One explanation of why Bernal compares the pagan priests to Dominicans is offered by Rolena Adorno, who raises the possibility that Bernal is casting the Dominicans in a negative light. After all, an enemy at court and at the Council of Indies would have been the Dominican priest Las Casas (‘‘Discourses on Colonialism,’’ 247–252). 19. ‘‘[C]incuenta años después de la conquista española . . . encontramos ya en México un modo de ser americano . . . En este resquemor incipiente latía ya el anhelo secular de las independencias americanas’’ (Obras, 11:83–84) [Fifty years after the Spanish Conquest . . . we already find in Mexico an American psychology . . . This early incompatibility already held the first seeds of America’s long aspiration to independence] (‘‘Vision of Anáhuac,’’ 35). 20. David Quint notes that the epic tradition is split between two rival traditions—the Virgilian, celebrating ‘‘imperial dominance,’’ and the Lucanic, ‘‘of the defeated whose resistance contains the germ of a broader republican or antimonarchical politics’’—and that this last tradition is closer to romance. ‘‘To the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering. Put another way, the victors experience history as a coherent, end-directed story told by their own power; the losers experience contingency that they are powerless to shape to their own ends’’ (Epic and Empire, 8–9). Bernal’s narrative could be thus read as progression away from the triumphalist and self-assured history-as-‘‘epic’’ of Gómara and toward a conflicted, and wandering, romance.

CHAPTER 2 1. Franco writes that the coupling of registers, as when moralizing commentary interrupts scenes of pleasurable ‘‘romantic adventures, dances, games, jokes, luxuriant spectacles,’’ occurs because Lizardi considers such spectacles dangerous and opposed to his bourgeois work ethic. Franco ruminates that this threat to the narrator’s authority, which she calls ‘‘heterogeneidad peligrosa’’ [dangerous heterogeneity], ultimately is canceled because the reformed Perico tells the story of his life in hindsight and with an authoritative ‘‘voz de la muerte’’ [voice of death]; the erstwhile ‘‘imitador de los malos ejemplos’’ [imitator of bad examples] has become ‘‘Don Pedro Sarmiento, el hombre arraigado, virtuoso, y moribundo’’ [Don Pedro Sarmiento, the rooted, virtuous, and dying man] (‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa,’’ 25).

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2. As David Brading explains, ‘‘[t]he effect of these . . . reforms upon the great merchant houses of Mexico City was remarkable. They found the age of relatively safe monopoly profits had ended. They were confronted with a more vigorous and numerous competition’’ (Miners and Merchants, 115). As a consequence of these changes, some of the alarmed montañés merchants turned to mining or agriculture; but some enterprising souls, in order to turn a profit, expanded their horizons and began to smuggle with forbidden partners like France and England. There is a widely held view that the decrees of 1778 expanded the worldview of the criollos and indeed planted the seeds of independence by imbuing the criollos with an entrepreneurial spirit (see, for instance, Enrique Florescano and Isabel Gil Sánchez, ‘‘La época de las reformas borbónicas’’; and John Lynch, ‘‘The Origins of Latin American Independence,’’ 13–30); but this view has been forcefully challenged in recent years by John Fisher. 3. Brading notes that almost all the nobiliary titles created during the eighteenth century were awarded to peninsular Spaniards residing in Mexico, and a great proportion of those were montañeses engaged in trade (Miners and Merchants, 105). 4. Versions of this rhyme are picked up by both A. Jiménez (Picardía, 22) and Francisco Santamaría (‘‘Perico’’). 5. The very format of the novel—the long, serialized form meant to be read in installments—was a result of economic pressures of the times. Since printers often published without a copyright, they were only given one opportunity to make a profit on a publication run before pirated editions appeared; this favored serialized narratives (Showalter, ‘‘Intricacies,’’ 434). A more literal but also relevant approach by Marc Shell in The Economy of Literature studies the representation of commerce within literature and the thematization of money and credit. 6. As Lukács sees it, the modern novel was a failure of the epic: the reduction of heroic struggles and cosmic emotional extremes of the epic to the intimate, interior spaces of the nineteenth-century realistic novel meant a diminution not only of the form but also of a worldview. Other Marxist critics like Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson see the novel and its detailed mimesis as both an analogue and instrument of materialist modernity. 7. See also Sieber, The Picaresque, 37–62. The Anglo-American historians of the picaresque, as Roberto González Echevarría notes, tend to see the development of the genre ‘‘in binary oppositions pitting predictable genres against no less predictable countergenres’’ (Celestina’s Brood, 46). As a (mostly) complementary converse to this appreciation of the late picaresque, Lennard Davis offers a compelling treatment of the ‘‘clandestine’’ origins of the modern novel. He claims that during the seventeenth century narrative began to announce itself as ‘‘purely factual or actually recent’’ and that this claim is tied to various ‘‘true’’ accounts of criminality, including journalistic ones (Factual Fictions, 70): ‘‘There seems to have been something inherently novelistic about the criminal, or rather the form of the novel seems almost to demand a criminal content’’; and the novel, like the criminal, ‘‘is both locus of fraud


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and the locus of truth’’ (125, 128). Aníbal González makes similar claims about El Periquillo, noting that dissembling is integral to both the pícaro and the journalist (Journalism, 40). 8. Aníbal González makes an intriguing connection between the parrot-like imitations of Perico and journalism: ‘‘he is not quite Everyman, nor is he merely an allegory of Hypocrisy; he is more likely, I would argue, an allegory of the journalist or perhaps in more general terms, Writing itself (at least, as Lizardi understood this concept)’’ (Journalism, 32). González argues that the acts of dissimulation which thread through the novel—from Perico passing in various guises of doctor, scribe, pharmacist, and so on, to the novel itself as journalistic ‘‘pamphlet ‘in drag’ ’’—are characteristic of Spanish American fiction in ‘‘[the] simultaneous claims of truthfulness and verifiability . . . a constant oscillation between journalistic and fictional discourses’’ (Journalism, 40). 9. Given its prominent place in the Latin American literary canon, El Periquillo has generated a substantial body of criticism, roughly divisible into three categories. The first consists of ‘‘aesthetic’’ appreciations of the novel, the best of which in my opinion is an essay by Aníbal González that explores the relationship between journalism and fiction in Latin American literature by focusing on their common, and paradoxical, claims to truth. Second is traditional literary history, perhaps the oldest category of Lizardi studies. The critics in this group include Jefferson Rea Spell, the founder of modern Lizardi studies, and several prominent Mexicans of the last hundred years, including Luis G. Urbina, Alfonso Reyes, and Agustín Yáñez. These writers either explore the European influences upon the novel (as does Spell in his studies of the influence of Rousseau on Lizardi) or attempt to locate Lizardi within the continuum of the Hispanic literary tradition (as do Urbina, Reyes, and Yáñez). More recently the Cuban critic Antonio Benítez-Rojo has continued in this literaryhistorical vein by examining El Periquillo’s place as a foundational text of Latin American fiction. Curiously, the Mexican notables focus more on the circumstances and the legacy of the novel (its place as a foundational text, its critical reception, and the genealogy of its character types) than on its aesthetics. Yáñez, writing from the vantage point of the postrevolutionary 1930s and 1940s, sees Lizardi’s text as useful for conflating the Wars of Independence with the 1910 Revolution: he casts the author as a prophet of revolutionary things to come. Yáñez defends Lizardi’s supposed breaches of ‘‘good taste’’ by erecting a hierarchy of literary tricksters, with the lépero, which he considers chiefly a negative example, at the very bottom. Incapable of useful activity, the lépero is the worst kind of lowlife. Slightly better is the pícaro, the familiar figure from Spanish literature, who is cunning but villainous, low, and cowardly. The highest spot is assigned to a novel Mexican character, the pelado, whom Yáñez associates with Lizardi’s heroes. This figure seems to be a kind of morally superior pícaro. The pelado is a rake who is grounded by an attachment to his native place: ‘‘la madre, el cónyuge, los hijos, la pocilga, el barrio, la ciudad, forman parte de la naturaleza del

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‘pelado’ ’’ (75) [the mother, the consort, the children, the shack, the barrio, the city, are all part of the nature of the ‘pelado’]. To his credit, the pelado often is a failure as a huckster. Like a pícaro, he may try to dissemble; but he is not very successful at this either, since he cannot easily disguise himself: shoes, clothes, and language not his own fit him poorly. Yáñez argues that the pelado is uncomfortable crossing boundaries, a debatable point (Fichas, 73). Other literary histories are concerned with the intellectual milieu in which Lizardi wrote. Among them is Lilian Alvarez de Testa’s extremely informative Ilustración, educación e independencia: Las ideas de José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, on which I have relied for this study. De Testa’s book comments also on historical developments relevant to Independence and shares many preoccupations with the other sociohistorical critics. The third and largest category of criticism on El Periquillo is sociohistorical and takes the novel as a useful springboard for a discussion of the economic and social realities of New Spain at the turn of the eighteenth century. Many of the sociohistorical critics focus on one end or the other of the ‘‘interclass’’ vocal expression, the ‘‘dialéctica leperuna.’’ Some read the lépero presence in the novel as a speaking subaltern, empowered and validated by its very existence in the text; one of the most thorough of these critics, Nancy Vogeley, characterizes the book as a metonymic record of the proletarian voice of the people and an example of anticolonial resistance. Others, like Franco, concentrate on the paternalistic agenda of a narrator who throws his hegemonic voice in an attempt to rein in these voices. Seconding the opinion of generations of Mexican critics from Yáñez on, Vogeley notices that Lizardi differentiates between a redeemable, potentially honest ‘‘pueblo’’ and a rude ‘‘plebe’’; she sees the inclusion of the ‘‘people’’ as an attempt at acknowledging ‘‘a national unity in which all Mexicans suffer poverty as a result of their colonial dependency’’ (‘‘Concept,’’ 462). In this sociopolitical vein, see also Mabel Moraña and Sonia Mora. Linguistic studies examining popular speech in Lizardi’s work could also be added to this line of inquiry as well (see Davis, ‘‘Mexican Spanish’’). Other readers with similar sociopolitical preoccupations, like Noel Salomón, make great use of the historical backdrop of the novel (the Spanish American move toward Independence) to argue that the novel itself has insurrectionary sympathies. 10. Spell writes that the ‘‘continuity of each narrative is marred by many moralizing passages’’ (Bridging the Gap, 230); more recently, Benítez-Rojo refers to Lizardi’s ‘‘disdain for artistic concerns’’ and its ‘‘flaws’’ (‘‘José Joaquín,’’ 335, 336). Nicolas Shumway explores a similarly doubled voice in Lizardi’s Don Catrín de la Fachenda. 11. In his reassessment of the literature of the early nineteenth century Andrew Bush shows how in these ‘‘discursos’’ the liberal imagination of early constitutionality in Latin America mirrors the dialectic of Romantic sensibility (Routes, 230– 242). 12. ‘‘Los interlocutores discuten siempre de manera amistosa. Consideran que el diálogo es más una búsqueda conjunta de la verdad que un esquema abstracto de


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enseñanza’’ (Gómez, El diálogo, 58) [The interlocutors always discuss on friendly terms. They consider dialogue to be more a common search for truth than an abstract scheme for teaching]. 13. Freedom of the press was a recent novelty, granted by the liberal Constitution of the Cortes de Cádiz: ‘‘La ley nos permite imprimir y publicar nuestras ideas. El mejor y único medio que tenemos de publicar nuestros escritos es el voceo de ellos’’ (Obras, 6:101) [The law allows us to print and publish our ideas. The best and only means we have to publish our writings lies in their voceo (vociferation, proclamation)]. 14. See, for instance, ‘‘Nuevo sistema de educación pública’’ [New System of Public Instruction] (Diario de México, 26 March 1807). For foreigners’ accounts of the poverty on the streets, see Brígida Mentz de Boege, México, 150–154. 15. These ‘‘heterotopias,’’ as Foucault calls them, are a sort of ‘‘effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location . . . such is the utopia of the mirror’’ (‘‘Of Other Spaces,’’ 24). 16. Alfredo Jiménez, the most creative recorder of Mexican vulgarity, defines albures as ‘‘zancadillas verbales teñidas de alusiones sexuales’’ [verbal shin-kicks colored with sexual allusions] (Nueva picardía, 21). Unfortunately research on this topic is rather inconsistent. During the first few decades of the twentieth century anthropological and ethnological methodology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and German existentialism inaugurated new efforts to examine the roots of Latin American popular culture. For the first time orality and ‘‘rude language’’ received serious attention: the Mexican Darío Rubio wrote La anarquía del lenguaje en la América española (1925); Fernando Ortiz produced studies of Afro-Cuban language and music; and Jorge Mañach, in Indagación del choteo (1928), explored ritual insult. The common thread in these lines of inquiry is politicized: it holds popular culture as a form of political subversion, in general considering all forms of irreverence and mockery as modes of cultural resistance. According to Mañach, this type of behavior was the only ‘‘recurso de los oprimidos—cualquiera que fuese la índole de la opresión. Al par que uno de los grandes padecimientos del cubano, la burla crónica ha sido una de sus grandes defensas’’ [recourse of the oppressed—whatever might be the source of the oppression. Along with the great ailments of the Cuban, his great defense has been a chronic habit of mockery] (65). Interestingly, this line of thought is roughly contemporaneous with Bakhtin’s theories of carnivalesque language and heteroglossia. This dualistic view—of popular language and culture as a subversive counterpoint to authority and the status quo—has been deeply influential and can be found, for instance, in Samuel Ramos’s notions of the pelado; in Octavio Paz’s idea of essential mexicanidad as oscillating between hermeticism and explosive ‘‘opening up’’; and in Jorge Portilla’s Fenomenología del relajo (1966), which from the standpoint of a Husserlian existentialism explores the philosophical implications of relajo [hell-raising] more as a subversive lin-

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guistic practice than as a culturally specific one. Finally, more recently, it informs the work of Carlos Monsiváis and Néstor García Canclini, centering on popular culture as a hybrid and destabilizing underside to cultural doxa. Regarding Mexican albureo specifically, while the practice is universally known —Paz makes specific mention of it (Laberinto, 35) and there are numerous references to it in Mexican literature of the twentieth century—it is difficult to establish its precise historical origins or even those of the term itself (see note 18 below). There is some linguistic and anthropological work, consisting mostly of field transcriptions, including Noé Gutiérrez González’s charming Qué trabajos pasa Carlos, a study of albureo in the working-class neighborhood of Tepito in Mexico City. Given the triply occluding factors that albureo is oral, vulgar, and performative, it is no surprise that it is absent from the various dictionaries of popular language from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hints of the practice are scattered throughout the print record: some gathered phrases of insult in the various refraneros seem to imply a calland-response (see Darío Rubio’s Refranes, proverbios y dichos y dicharachos mexicanos). Ali Chumacero points to what could be a sanitized session of albureo in an 1860 novel, El capitán Rossi by Niceto de Zamacois (in Jiménez, Picardía, 226). By the late nineteenth century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, various opposition newspapers like El Ahuizote hinted at the double-entendres of albures in their use of popular language. By the 1920s the anarchist/syndicalist newspaper Madre Matiana ran its hilarious headlines almost exclusively in the taunts of albureo. Monsiváis offers some educated guesses on the origins of the practice (‘‘La vida,’’ 58). 17. As Jiménez notes, ‘‘cuando los albureros son en extremo hábiles—lo cual es muy común en algunas regiones del país—entonces la conversación parece normal y hasta recatada, pues hablan con absoluta naturalidad, a pesar de que la intención de cada frase es otra, muy distinta’’ (Picardía, 77) [when the albureros are skillful in the extreme—something quite common in some parts of the country—then the conversation seems normal and even modest, since they speak with absolute naturalness, even though the intention of each phrase is another, quite different one]. 18. According to the eighteenth-century Diccionario de autoridades (1726), ‘‘albur’’ was a lottery-like draw game, where one played not against all the other players for a collective pot (a monte) but against a dealer, somewhat like modern-day twentyone or blackjack. Jorge Mejía Prieto, in reference to the contest of insults, offers the suggestion that the later use of the word is related to the French calembour (Albures, 9). 19. Given the thematic obsession with the male sexual organs, the arsenal at the disposal of albureros is somewhat limited. Monsiváis notes that if the metaphors of albures are taken out of their interactive context and written down they can appear repetitive and almost boring, perhaps like the frequent, exhortative sermons Perico endures and then ignores (‘‘La vida,’’ 59). As Gates writes, style—the appeal to the listener—is everything in verbal combats; and quite often the style is the meaning (Signifying Monkey, 59). 20. Mauss, like Lizardi, argues that gambling is a commercial activity, and part


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of the system of obligations regulated by honor and credit (the ‘‘system of total services’’), much like gift-giving (The Gift, 5, 112n139). 21. Gates similarly meditates on the aggressive aspect of ‘‘Signifyin(g),’’ noting that its aggression is often misunderstood as literal by those not familiar with its normal parameters, especially by whites both unaware of the social and formal conventions and resorting to their own stereotypes of ‘‘black’’ behavior: ‘‘It is curious to me how very many definitions of Signifyin(g) share this stress on what we might think of as the black person’s symbolic aggression, enacted in language, rather than upon the play of language itself, the meta-rhetorical structures in evidence. ‘Making fun of’ is a long way from ‘making fun’ and it is the latter that defines Signifyin(g)’’ (Signifying Monkey, 68). Gates further cites Roger D. Abrahams, who notes that the practice can range from ‘‘overtly aggressive’’ to ‘‘nondirective playing’’ or ‘‘directive sounding’’ (Signifying Monkey, 78). 22. ‘‘[C]ada uno de los interlocutores, mediante trampas verbales y de ingeniosas combinaciones lingüísticas, procura anonadar a su adversario, el vencido es el que no puede contestar, el que se traga las palabras de su enemigo’’ (Paz, 35) [Each of the interlocutors, by means of verbal traps and ingenious linguistic combinations, attempts to baffle his adversary; the loser is the one who cannot answer, the one forced to swallow the words of his enemy].

CHAPTER 3 1. Although the French edition of the Essai politique saw wide and almost instantaneous dissemination, it was not translated into Spanish and printed in Madrid until 1818. The statistical portion of the Essai (the Tablas geográficas), however, was presented to Viceroy José de Iturrigaray in New Spain as early as 1804 (just before Humboldt left) and widely circulated there. 2. In my discussion, titles are in the language of first publication, followed by the title of the standard English translation in brackets wherever these translations exist. 3. On the Mexican intelligentsia’s debt to Humboldt, see María del Carmen Ruiz Castañeda, ‘‘El pensamiento social.’’ 4. Recent scholarship has reexamined the nineteenth-century myth of Humboldt as father of Latin American independence, questioning the monocausal link: for instance, many of the articles collected by Mario Magallón and Leopoldo Zea in a three-volume work on Humboldt in the series Latinoamérica Fin de Milenio (vols. 12–14), particularly Juan Ortega y Medina’s ‘‘Humboldt visto por los mexicanos.’’ 5. This work, first issued in 1829, was one of the few Humboldt published in his native German; it was also his most disseminated work. He called Ansichten his ‘‘favorite work,’’ revising it and expanding it numerous times throughout his life (Hagen-Hein, Alexander von Humboldt, 83). Textual citations are from the English translations (most of which were published during Humboldt’s lifetime and approved by him).

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6. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 117–131; Brading, First Americans, 532; and Michael Dettelbach, ‘‘Global Physics,’’ 273–277. 7. Earlier, in discussing another codex, Humboldt had mentioned that ‘‘[t]he locals claim that a dead man is reduced to eternal silence; according to them, living is speaking’’ (Vues, 166–167). 8. In Kosmos Humboldt offers an extended quote from his brother Wilhelm’s Über die Kawi-Sprache (1824) about how each person everywhere shares the ‘‘touching and beautiful attribute,’’ after leaving his or her birthplace, of ‘‘[pining] like a plant, for his native soil.’’ Recognition of this common nostalgia for the landscape of one’s youth, regardless of the landscape, is the ‘‘bond of humanity’’ (Cosmos, 1:358– 359). 9. Brading claims that Humboldt’s American works represent a missed opportunity for insightful social analysis à la Alexis de Tocqueville, offering instead a ‘‘cameralist description, uncontested’’ (First Americans, 532). 10. This travel journal was published only in recent decades as a facsimile of Humboldt’s very rough fieldnotes. It was never edited for publication, unlike his Relation historique [Personal Narrative]. 11. This odd little piece wound its way to a prominent place in Humboldt’s oeuvre: much later Humboldt selected it for republication in Ansichten der Natur, his own ‘‘favorite’’ among all his works (Aspects, 2:251–263). 12. Hagen-Hein claims that Humboldt (expressing a brand of European liberalism which would be consistent throughout his life) indeed believed organic and inorganic material to be different but saw the difference as chemical, not essential or spiritual. Humboldt here opposes any animistic notion of a soul proposed by vitalists, who viewed research into the electrical basis of organic matter as evidence that there was an essential life force, a vis vitalis, analogous to the existence of the Christian soul. One critic writes that ‘‘Humboldt [in this allegory] tries to explain this phenomenon of vitality against dead matter by representing a ‘vital force’ as the highest organizing principle of all living phenomena’’ and not any physical matter or property (Hagen-Hein, ‘‘Growing to Maturity,’’ 38). Given Humboldt’s early interest in galvanic experiments, this reading is quite plausible (see Kümmel, ‘‘Alexander von Humboldt and Medicine’’). 13. Diderot was attempting to differentiate a person from the attribute: ‘‘Before this time genius was regarded as a quality or attribute, it was a talent . . . With Diderot a genius became something a person was, a special kind . . . something similar to what Keats later called a ‘negative capability,’ the unconscious observation and absorption of details, experiences and events and details’’ (Mason, Irresistible Diderot, 268–269). 14. Since a reliable census had not been taken in the recent past, Humboldt carried out his own calculation of the Mexican population by looking at sample parish records of deaths then guessing that Mexico is relatively ‘‘pas sain’’ [unhealthy] and that the death rate must be like that of similarly unhealthy places in Europe (Reise, 325; Political Essay, 3:64, 4:107).


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15. Understandably, this subjectivizing impulse cannot be explained in entirely rational or empirical terms, so Goethe refers to accepting this belief as a leap of faith: ‘‘We do not expect everyone to subscribe to this way of thinking about these matters; those who feel at ease with this, as we do, will readily accept it. Nor do we wish to engage in quarrels . . . any mention of color at all will send the philosopher into a rage’’ (Scientific Studies, 164–165). In a stimulating set of studies, Lorraine Daston explores the surprising history of scientific ‘‘objectivity,’’ especially the way the binary objectivity/subjectivity has been variously associated with other oppositions from the Renaissance on: truth vs. untruth (‘‘Objectivity versus Truth’’), practice and precept (‘‘The Image of Objectivity’’), partiality and impartiality (Daston and Galison, ‘‘Baconian Facts’’). 16. Discussing his ‘‘Relationship to Science’’ (1820), Goethe writes: ‘‘From youth on we are taught to view the sciences as subjects we can lay hold of, use, command . . . With deeper study we also see how the subjective element plays a true role in the sciences. Our efforts will not prosper until we come to know ourselves and our own character’’ (Scientific Studies, 138). 17. We find a similarly counterintuitive process of education in Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), in which Schiller, drawing from Johann Winckelmann, proposes that a necessary step in the path to awareness of oneself is a rigorous education in artificial aesthetic forms. Only after a disciplined apprenticeship in forms difficult enough to make one forget oneself—for instance, stylized English dance, an elaborate rhetorical figure, or an allegory, ‘‘rigorous enough to be patterned after the model of mathematical language’’—to quote Paul de Man—will real self-awareness be reached (Rhetoric, 264–265). The productive tension behind Schiller’s and Goethe’s ideas implies that only through ‘‘deep study’’ of an object, almost to the point of neglect of the subject, can the self truly become aware of itself ‘‘and its character.’’ 18. On this debate, see Goethe’s ‘‘Suggestions for a Comparative Approach Reconciling the Vulcanists and Neptunists on the Question of the Origin of Basalt’’ (Scientific Studies, 135–137) and Val Gendron (Dragon Tree, 37–38, 42). 19. One of Humboldt’s ‘‘grand unification theories’’ about the organicity of the natural world concerned similarities among all volcanic ranges. In the Reise he makes the observation (and would later expand on it at length): ‘‘Nothing [is] more striking than this uniformity of directions, this parallelism of beds within such tornup terrains. The inclination is less uniform and sometimes varied. I discovered this parallelism in Franconia in 1793, and I have confirmed it through an innumerable quantity of measurements taken in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, and throughout all South America . . . This is perhaps the most interesting discovery that I have made’’ (Reise, 317). 20. ‘‘The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces’’ (Cos-

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mos, 1:xvii), an organic and subjective philosophy that was influenced by Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784). 21. ‘‘The Mexican Deucalion,’’ as Varnhagen von Ense clarifies in his own footnote (Humboldt, Letters, 222). 22. For instance, Chapters 2 and 3 of Buffon’s Histoire. 23. For the criollos’ resentment of the caste system that favors native-born Spaniards, see Political Essay, 1:205. 24. In the passage from the Relation historique mentioned earlier, where Humboldt overcomes his ‘‘repugnance’’ for first-person narration, he claims that the ‘‘most faithful picture’’ of culture is given by a participant observer, ‘‘who best displays relations of men towards each other. The character of a savage or civilized life is portrayed either in the obstacles a traveler meets with, or in the sensations he feels. It is the traveler himself whom we continually desire to see in contact with the objects which surround him’’ (Personal Narrative, 20). 25. I have translated the citation from the Letters of Antonio Pérez, which Humboldt gives in the Spanish original.

CHAPTER 4 1. For a detailed historical account of Vasconcelos’s administration, see Claude Fell’s compendious José Vasconcelos: Los años del águila. José Joaquín Blanco (Se llamaba Vasconcelos) and Carlos Monsiváis (‘‘Notas’’) also give insightful and engaging (if somewhat subjective) analyses of the cultural importance of Vasconcelos’s tenure. 2. Vasconcelos narrates his version in his autobiography (Memorias, 2:113–130). See also Blanco (Se llamaba Vasconcelos, 79–128). 3. Vasconcelos’s anti-Communist liberalism became a bona-fide slide into conservatism later in his life, as for instance in Qué es el comunismo (1936). From the early 1930s on, he sporadically headed pro-fascist periodicals like La Antorcha and produced pro-church works like Letanías del atardecer (1957). 4. According to Vasconcelos, nationalism and patriotism within the individual Latin countries are little more than inflamed provincialism and are deeply counterproductive. For Vasconcelos, Latin America is a single country that stretches from Tierra del Fuego to the border of the United States. He writes: ‘‘Se perdió la mayor de las batallas el día en que cada una de las repúblicas ibéricas se lanzó a hacer vida propia, vida desligada de sus hermanos . . . Los creadores de nuestro nacionalismo fueron, sin saberlo, los mejores aliados del sajón’’ [The biggest of battles was lost the day that each of the Iberian republics set out to make its own way, separate from its brethren . . . The creators of our nationalism were, without knowing it, the best allies of the Saxon] (‘‘La raza cósmica,’’ 92). 5. Vasconcelos comments on the Saxon race that ‘‘aceptamos los ideales superiores del blanco, pero no su arrogancia’’ [we accept the superior ideals of the white


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man, but not his arrogance] (‘‘La raza cósmica,’’ 111). His solution for the blind, anemic Saxons is the same as for the Indians: include them. In assimilating all other races, the Latins will succeed where the Anglo-Saxons have failed and eventually assimilate the Anglo-Saxons themselves, since they have a useful contribution to make with their technological resources. Just as the Indians are desirable because of their perceived ‘‘racial vitality,’’ so the ‘‘Saxons’’ will make a nice addition to the fusion (‘‘Indología,’’ 177). No ethnic group can resist assimilation, and if the Indians or any other groups insist on maintaining a separate culture, this will impede the final synthesis of the new society. ‘‘Indigenismo,’’ like any petty regional pride, is counterproductive. The Indian is a mestizo in potentia, because ‘‘no se ha fusionado aún en su totalidad, con la sangre española’’ [he has not yet fused himself totally with Spanish blood], although he could easily do so if he wished (‘‘La raza cósmica,’’ 99). 6. The radical Left, picking up on this inconsistency in the 1920s, criticized Vasconcelos’s policy as a ‘‘monopolio de la clase enemiga del proletariado’’ [monopoly on part of the class which is the enemy of the proletariat] (in the words of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, president of the powerful Committee on Education of the Revolutionary Workers’ Union [CROM] and Vasconcelos’s nemesis). This view criticized Vasconcelos for proposing to exterminate the Indian through assimilation (see Lombardo Toledano, El problema, 62–72). 7. Recent years have witnessed the centrist intelligentsia’s baffled reaction to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Enrique Krauze wrote in 1994, in the midst of the uprising, that there is no ‘‘Indian problem’’ in Mexico (‘‘Humboldt y México,’’ 22). 8. Sylvia Molloy argues a similar point about Vasconcelos’s Memorias. She claims that due to his psychosexual relationship with his mother Vasconcelos also eroticizes the bourgeois ‘‘mother’’ culture that she provided him during his formative years in the wilds of northern Mexico. Molloy writes that his mother was the ‘‘cultural guide . . . representing the ‘civilization’ left behind . . . In a frontier world doubly exposed to invasion from the barbarians—Indians or ‘Yankees’—the mother plays the role of chief memorator’’ (At Face Value, 197). Explaining what she sees as a shift from the ‘‘Lyrical I’’ of the young and precocious Vasconcelos to the ‘‘Epic I’’ of his prophetic writings, Molloy also claims that the death of his mother is his moment of conversion. After this death Vasconcelos monumentalizes (or ‘‘muralizes’’) himself, replacing his erotic desire for the mother with erotic desire for the culture at large (206). 9. Lois Parkinson Zamora applies Brooks’s concept of the ‘‘usable past’’ to North American and Latin American literary history. She offers an account of antipositivist historical consciousness with reference to Vasconcelos as well (The Usable Past, 26–32). 10. The ateneístas, like Caso and Reyes, were criticized for their aesthetic and intellectual stances, which were read by some camps as avoiding political engagement (Monsiváis, ‘‘Notas,’’ 387–396). Although Vasconcelos at several points placed ateneístas and other intellectuals on government payrolls, none negotiated political

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power and idealism as effectively as he did. Vasconcelos even had a falling out with Henríquez Ureña, over what Henríquez Ureña felt was Vasconcelos’s compromise of their progressive ideals in order to retain power. 11. In a speech given in 1922 in Washington, D.C., Vasconcelos tries to soothe North American fears about Mexico’s new revolutionary government by claiming that his goals are no different than those of the North American middle classes: ‘‘Cuando algunos de nuestros enemigos nos proclaman bolcheviques, siempre podemos contestar con los hechos: en realidad somos un Estado feudal que trata de modernizarse. En verdad estamos tratando de implantar un régimen agrario semejante al que existe en Ohio, en la Nueva Inglaterra o en las Dakotas. Y si Kansas, con sus millares de cultivos feraces, es bolchevique, entonces también nosotros deseamos serlo’’ [When some of our enemies call us Bolsheviks, we can always answer with the facts: we are really a feudal state attempting to modernize. We are really trying to implant an agrarian system similar to the one found in Ohio, in New England, or in the Dakotas. And if Kansas, with its thousands of fertile crops, is Bolshevik, then we wish to be so too] (in Guillén, Vasconcelos, 215–216). In his memoirs, Vasconcelos eventually reveals his true enemy: the rude and unenlightened masses, whom he called ‘‘aquella plebe gallera y alcohólica [que] sería en pocos años dueña de la república’’ [the cockfighting and alcoholic rabble which in a few years would own the republic] (Memorias, 1:296). Vasconcelos gradually rejected the communism of the Muralists because of their celebration of this very ‘‘plebe.’’ 12. Vasconcelos writes that during one of the few relatively brief periods of prosperity he had in his life, during the time when Francisco Madero was in power: ‘‘Poseía ahora muchos libros lujosamente empastados; pero se quedaban de adorno de la biblioteca, pues no tenía tiempo de hojearlos’’ [I owned many sumptuously bound books, but they merely decorated my library, because I did not have the time to leaf through them] (Memorias, 1:408). 13. Vasconcelos offers two assessments of Madero in this regard. In his memoirs, he focuses on Madero’s transformation upon coming into power: ‘‘Antes, el presidente iba a los gallos: ahora disfrutaba de . . . un concierto sinfónico’’ [Before, the president used to go to cockfights: now he enjoyed . . . a symphony concert] (Memorias, 1:423). But in another account of Madero’s formation, Vasconcelos wrote that ‘‘[viéndolo] recordamos el tipo de esos políticos franceses, encumbrados a fuerza de talento y de honestidad . . . su educación es la del hombre de empresa, creador de bienes en la industria . . . no rico a la manera colonial mediante la explotación del trabajo ajeno en el latifundio, sino en la forma moderna del pioneer’’ [(seeing him) reminded us of French politicians, brimming with talent and honesty . . . his education is that of a businessman, the kind which creates wealth in industry . . . not rich in the colonial fashion through the exploitation of workers on plantations, but rather (rich) in the modern, ‘pioneer’ form] (Breve historia, 472–475). 14. Krauze reads this event as the single climactic failure of a lifelong obsession with the ideal. He claims that Vasconcelos ultimately became the victim of his own


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‘‘exigencias de Absoluto’’ [exigencies of the Absolute], forfeiting his canonization as a rarefied secular saint like Madero and choosing instead to become an imperfect, more human, and somehow more ‘‘perdurable’’ [lasting] artist (‘‘El caudillo,’’ 49). 15. Krauze is convinced of Vasconcelos’s unironic belief in what he was writing: ‘‘Puede leerse ahora como un texto absurdo, pero Vasconcelos no lo escribió con una sonrisa. Veía el futuro imperio estético . . . no por designio sino por emanación, por desbordamiento’’ [It can be read as an absurd text, but Vasconcelos did not write it with a smile. He saw the future aesthetic empire . . . not by design but by emanation, by inundation] (‘‘El caudillo,’’ 42).

CHAPTER 5 1. Sarduy was initially enthusiastic about the Revolution and ultimately benefited from it. He published in its house organ, Lunes de Revolución, and secured a government fellowship to study art in Paris in the early sixties. That he chose to remain in Paris after the fellowship expired was not an overt act of desertion, as González Echevarría explains, but the beginning of a mutual distancing which reached accusatory levels; the debate usually centered on the question of what, and where, an intellectual could do to be truly ‘‘Cuban’’; but of course underlying this are widely divergent worldviews, reminiscent of the avant-garde initially encouraged by the Soviet Revolution, which later parted ways with it (Ruta, 36–56). 2. Victor Turner writes that some societies and individuals manage to exist in just such a perpetual liminality by becoming antistructural fixtures within the structure of society at large (for instance, certain cloistered monks, court jesters, and some ethnic minorities like Gypsies). But to become outsiders within, there are risks: ‘‘In practice of course, the impetus becomes itself an institution among other institutions—often more fanatical and militant than the rest’’ (Ritual Process, 112). 3. Perhaps the most famous of these is Enrique Krauze, whose bristling critique appeared simultaneously in 1988 in Octavio Paz’s magazine Vuelta and in the New Republic. Up to that point Paz and Fuentes had been nursing a growing feud over politics. In his attack Krauze, probably at Paz’s behest, portrays Fuentes as an insincere actor, a literary gesticulator who struts and frets and produces mostly derivative work, ‘‘que no significa nada, pero suena rudo, suena tough. Que no convence, pero apabulla, apantalla’’ [which signifies nothing, but sounds tough. It’s not convincing, but it is striking, impressive] (‘‘La comedia mexicana,’’ 21). Essentially he accuses Fuentes of irresponsibly manipulating the vast sweep of history for his personal use and inappropriately conflating the personal and the universal (for the details of the rift between Fuentes and Paz, see Williams’s Writings of Carlos Fuentes [42–43] and Octavio Paz’s obituary in the New York Times [Kandell, ‘‘Octavio Paz,’’ 1]). Jorge Volpi similarly feels that Fuentes’s left-wing politics are a posture: ‘‘Aún cuando nunca ha estado cerca del comunismo, la revolución cubana se encarga de acercarlo a los intelectuales comprometidos del tercer mundo . . . Fuentes quiere ser visto como una de

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las voces latinoamericanas que apuestan por el cambio’’ [Even though he has never been close to communism, the Cuban Revolution brought him closer to those committed third-world intellectuals . . . Fuentes wants to be seen as one of the Latin American voices who has cast his lot for change] (La imaginación, 69). 4. As Raymond Williams notes, ‘‘if Terra Nostra ends in apocalypse, A Change of Skin ends with Javier in a state of (post-modern) exhaustion’’ (Writings, 131).

CHAPTER 6 1. The mirror, doubling, and frames are all familiar elements of the Baroque. As Peter Skrine writes, ‘‘glass can be used both as a mirror and as a window pane; it can open up new prospects and reveal a cosmos or a minute microcosm—or it can reveal us to ourselves with startling exactness, and capture a reflection even more fragile and ephemeral than it is itself’’ (Baroque, 147). Foucault relates this imagery to madness, noting that somewhere from the middle to the end of the sixteenth century (roughly when the licenciado Vidriera appears) ‘‘the symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive’’ (Madness, 27). 2. In his study of the development of the figure of the fool in sixteenth-century literature, Walter Kaiser notes that the fool speaks in hyperhuman terms; his madness is a condensed reality which, as Aristotle suggested, is the ‘‘most human of all’’ (Praisers, 11).The fool is inseparable from culture; if a culture listens to its fools, it can correct its course and reaffirm its very existence. Both Kaiser and Foucault locate the incidence of fools in transitional times, during what Northrop Frye, echoing Vico, would call the ‘‘myth of winter’’ (Anatomy of Criticism, 223–239), the reflexive moment late in the evolution of a culture, a time ripe for irony and fools. 3. Instead of being like Don Quixote or King Lear, the figure of the licenciado has all the markers of a more traditional (medieval, to use Foucault’s chronology) fool, a mere mouthpiece for opprobrium like Erasmus’s Stultitia in his Praise of Folly (1511), who is simply a satirical tool and not yet the cultural barometer of unstable times which the fool would become in the later sixteenth century. Indeed the structure of the licenciado’s unprovoked diatribes resembles Stultitia’s prudish invectives against the professions, issued out of fairly conventional morality and not out of cosmic and ontological uncertainty, as they are for Don Quixote. 4. Most of Gómez-Peña’s performance pieces are presented several times and in numerous venues, with script and staging variations between performances. The dates given are for the span of time during which the pieces were performed. Performances are codified after the fact in ‘‘performance notes’’—transcriptions accompanied by descriptions and photographs—or on video recordings, as follows: ‘‘Califas’’ and ‘‘Documented/Undocumented’’ in Warrior for Gringostroika (1993); Border


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brujo as a videorecording of the same name (1990); Guatinaui World Tour as the video recording The Couple in the Cage (1993); A Seminar on Museum Race Relations in New World Border (1996); Crucifiction Project in both The New World Border (1996) and Temple of Confessions (1996); and Temple of Confessions in the book of the same name (1996). 5. Gómez-Peña recalls an uncomfortable encounter with a Chicano Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin: ‘‘Instead of the ‘informal’ gathering we had been promised, Roberto and I suddenly find ourselves facing an academic Board of inquisitors: a handful of somber professors and thirty or forty nervous students who wait in tense silence . . . ‘Gómez-Peña: you’re Mexican right? Why did you suddenly decide to make Chicano art? To get more grant money? Or because it’s cool?’ . . . First I think this is just an aggressive way of starting a juicy political conversation—after all U.S. academics aren’t exactly known for their tact or politeness. But the questions keep getting increasingly more vicious and personal. A graduate student asks what we’re doing working with a white woman . . . We’ve clearly found ourselves in the middle of a battle that has nothing to do with us or with our work . . . The essentialist lynching ritual goes on for two more hours’’ (Dangerous Border Crossers, 150–151). The Chicano intelligentsia has long (and understandably) expressed misgivings about the northern field trips of Mexican intellectuals (particularly those from the capital). In the 1940s Paz reached into the ‘‘Pachuco’’ culture of Los Angeles in order to find insight into the Mexico that the immigrants left behind; in the 1960s and 1970s it became a gesture of political solidarity to express interest in Chicano writers, and Chicanos began to publish in Mexico and Latin America, with mixed success. Fuentes visited the border area in La frontera de cristal (1995). Conversely, there are numerous accounts of Chicanos—from Tino Villanueva to Richard Rodriguez—traveling to Mexico and writing accounts of their return: as they try to connect with the Mexican intelligentsia, they are struck by the gap, sometimes finding a sense of goodwill but little in common (see Rodriguez, Days, 48–79). 6. Eduardo Barrera Herrera claims that Gómez-Peña’s representation of the border forms a ‘‘quasi-incestuous’’ circle with rarefied, academic high theory: ‘‘La Frontera de Gómez Peña se convierte en la Frontera de García Canclini y Homi Bhabha, y el artista se convierte en El Migrante’’ [The Border of Gómez Peña becomes the Border of García Canclini y Homi Bhabha, and the artist becomes The Migrant]. This in turn ‘‘excluye a los referentes primarios’’ [excludes the primary referents], presumably ‘‘true’’ border denizens, unlike Gómez-Peña (‘‘Apropiación,’’ 16). 7. Jill Kuhnheim expresses a similar opinion: ‘‘there is a deceptive hybridity in this text; attempts to multiply personae do not fragment into difference but reproduce like echoes or mirrors. The speaker’s identity depends upon an opposition between multiculturalism and a monoculture that he has asserted no longer exists, but that he must reinforce so that he can position himself as a hero destroying it’’ (‘‘Economy,’’ 29). 8. In some of their proscenium pieces, Gómez-Peña and Fusco ‘‘segregated’’ the

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audience as it entered the theater. ‘‘Sometimes ‘ethnic minorities,’ immigrants, and bilingual audience members would be allowed to enter the theater first and to take the best seats . . . In doing so, we made the ‘others’—the monolingual ‘Anglos’—feel ‘excluded’ or marginalized. The idea was to . . . [force] monolingual/monocultural Americans to feel like outsiders and ‘minorities’ in their own country . . . At the end of each performance we would have a discussion’’ (New World Border, 95–96). 9. Diana Taylor finds this impulse to incorporate the audience understandably disquieting: ‘‘So what do we do? Play along as a ‘good’ audience? And what would that mean, exactly . . . There is no appropriate reaction, no ‘true’ or ‘false’ response to this performance that, as Fusco writes, ‘falls between truth and fiction’ ’’ (‘‘Savage Performance,’’ 169). 10. Grant Kester criticizes performance artists like Gómez-Peña and Karen Finley for engaging in what he calls ‘‘rant’’ performance, cravenly invading the subject positions and ‘‘speaking for’’ the oppressed to further a performative agenda, without ‘‘having to account for their own cultural position, and privilege’’ (‘‘Rhetorical Questions,’’ 15). Kuhnheim similarly argues that although Gómez-Peña pretends to aim for generic and political pluralism, his range of narrative ‘‘languages’’ displays no ‘‘social heteroglossia, but one authoritative voice’’ (‘‘Economy of Performance,’’ 28).

CONCLUSION 1. ‘‘Las complicaciones rituales de la cortesía, la persistencia del humanismo clásico, el gusto por las formas cerradas en la poesía (el soneto, la décima, por ejemplo), nuestro amor por la geometría en las artes decorativas, por el dibujo y la composición en la pintura, la pobreza de nuestro Romanticismo frente a la excelencia de nuestro arte barroco, el formalismo de nuestras instituciones políticas y, en fin, la peligrosa inclinación que mostramos por las formulas—sociales, morales y burocráticas’’ (Laberinto, 29) [The ritual complications of our courtesy, the persistence of classical Humanism, our fondness for closed poetic forms (the sonnet and the décima, for example), our love for geometry in the decorative arts and for design and composition in painting, the poverty of our Romantic art compared with the excellence of our Baroque art, the formalism of our political institutions, and, finally, our dangerous inclination toward formalism, whether social, moral or bureaucratic] (32). 2. Soundly defeated in the elections of 2000, the PRI, as one party official states, has ‘‘learned how to knock on doors again’’ (Kraul, ‘‘Heart,’’ A5). In a study of how Mexican officialdom has dealt with mass culture, Anne Rubenstein notes (in a chapter in Bad Language on official censorship of comic books that happens also to be titled ‘‘The Uses of Failure’’) that the bureaucracy has a habit and a history of being grossly ineffective at its stated missions; however, various official entities have developed almost creative roles quite different from their stated purpose. She gives the example of the ludicrously inadequate censorship office that in its failure found its true calling: while it did a poor job of censoring the content of mass publications, it


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successfully mediated between high and low culture and helped protect home-grown Mexican businesses from foreign (if equally ‘‘inappropriate’’) publications. This recalls the old legal double standard from the colonial period, obedézcase pero no se cumpla [obey but do not implement] or that phrase familiar to anyone who has tried to buy a scarce item in Latin America: hay pero no tenemos [it’s here but we don’t have it]—both affirmative statements that come with built-in negations and that seem ready-made for inefficiency and failure. But in Latin America things that are broken or incomplete, don’t work, or are purposefully useless sometimes hide their own resiliency and their own solutions.

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NOTE TO PAGE 187

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232


Index

Abraham, Nicolas, 188–189, 192 Abrahams, Rogers D., 208n.21 Adorno, Rolena, 200n.11, 202n.18 Aeneas Sylvius (Pius II), 23 Agua quemada (Fuentes), 14 El Ahuizote, 8, 207n.16 Alamán, Lucas, 82, 83, 197n.9 Albures and albureros, 63, 71–77, 80, 206–207nn.16–19, 208n.22 Allegory, 92, 94–96, 98, 209n.12 Allende, Salvador, 189 Alonso, Carlos, 196n.5 Alonso, Dámaso, 156 Alva Ixtlixóchitl, Fernando de, 44 Alvarado, Pedro de, 30, 201n.14 Amadís de Gaula, 35 Analogy, 85, 91–92, 96, 98 Anderson, Benedict, 2–3, 50, 195n.4, 198n.14 Ansichten der Natur [Aspects of Nature] (A. Humboldt), 84–85, 91–92, 99, 103, 208n.5, 209n.11 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 173–174, 176, 177, 187 Aporia (paralysis), 10–11 Arguedas, Alcides, 9, 116 Aristotle, 24, 26, 68, 70, 74, 151, 215n.2 Artaud, Antonin, 3, 81, 197n.11 Arteaga, Alfred, 174, 175 Aspects of Nature [Ansichten der Natur] (A. Humboldt), 84–85, 91–92, 99, 103, 208n.5, 209n.11 Ateneístas, 118–121, 123, 126, 212– 213n.10 Ateneo de la Juventud, 118, 119 Austin, J. L., 135 Avalle–Arce, Juan Bautista, 169

Avelar, Idelber, 189 La Avispa, 8 Aztecs: Bernal Díaz on, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 201–202n.18; codices of, 88, 89, 90, 96; in Fuentes’ Cambio de piel, 143; and human sacrifice, 28, 36; Humboldt on, 88, 89, 96, 102; influence of, on Europeans, 146; and Moctezuma, 25, 27; myth of, 46. See also Indians; Spanish Conquest Bacon, Francis, 84 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11, 12, 41, 56, 74, 79, 156–157, 167, 169, 198n.15, 206n.16 Balcells, Carmen, 158 Balzac, Honoré de, 143, 161–162 Baroque and Neobaroque, 145–157, 159–162, 167, 185, 215n.1 Barreda, Gabino, 83 Barrera Herrera, Eduardo, 216n.6 Barthes, Roland, 155, 159, 198n.15 Bartra, Roger, 4, 5, 6, 8, 196nn.5–6, 198n.14 Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 138 Bello, Andrés, 13, 49, 51, 197n.9 Benítez–Rojo, Antonio, 49, 204n.9, 205n.10 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 195n.4 Bergson, Henri, 119 Berlin, Isaiah, 91 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 151, 152 Blackburn, Alexander, 55–56 Blake, Casey Nelson, 120 Blake, William, 5 Blanco, José Joaquín, 127, 133, 211n.1 Bloom, Harold, 5, 81

Body, 147–153, 158–159, 161–162 Bolívar, Simón, 13, 45, 82 Books. See Literacy and reading Boom movement, 145, 154, 158 Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 175 Border brujo (Gómez–Peña), 170, 215– 216n.4 Border crossing: Anzaldúa on, 173–174, 176, 177, 187; Arteaga on, 174; in Gómez–Peña’s performance art, 2, 4, 7, 170–185, 216–217nn.6–10; and licenciado (holy fool), 165–170, 173, 177, 178, 183–185; and liminality, 167–169, 183, 184–185, 187; and mestizaje (racial hybridity), 174; in U.S. Latino/Latina literature, 173–174 Borromini, Francesco, 155 Botello, 28–29 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5 Bourne, Randolph, 119 Bowen, Margarita, 84, 90 Brading, David, 102, 203nn.2–3, 209n.9 Breton, André, 197n.11 Breve historia de México (Vasconcelos), 213n.13 Brooks, Francis J., 202n.18 Brooks, Van Wyck, 119, 120 Buffon, Comte de, 85, 101, 108, 211n.22 Bunge, Carlos Octavio, 9, 116 Bunsen, Baron Robert Wilhelm von, 85, 98, 99–101, 103 Burkart, Joseph, 64 Burke, Edmund, 101 Bush, Andrew, 205n.11 Caesar, Julius, 35 Caldéron de la Barca, Madame Fanny, 65, 67, 70, 72–73, 75, 109 ‘‘Califas’’ (Gómez–Peña), 176–177 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 133 Cambio de piel (Fuentes), 2, 143–145, 148–150, 153, 156, 157, 159, 161–164, 215n.4 Carnival and carnivalesque, 11–13, 17, 41, 43, 74, 75, 156–157, 167, 206n.16. See also Liminality

234

Carpentier, Alejo, 146, 154, 161 Caruth, Cathy, 8 Cascardi, Anthony, 31 Caso, Antonio, 118, 196n.6, 212n.10 Cathedral of Toledo, 159–161 Catholicism, 23, 40, 51, 100, 103, 133, 144, 147, 153–154, 198n.14, 201– 202n.18 Caudillos, 13–14, 36, 62, 113, 158, 187, 188, 190–192 Censorship, 51, 62–63, 217–218n.2 Cervantes, Miguel de, 198n.15 —works: Don Quijote, 5, 21, 22, 55, 165, 168, 169, 215n.3; Novelas ejemplares, 165–170, 173, 178, 183–184 Chagall, Marc, 114 Charles IV, 104, 106, 190 Charlot, Jean, 114 Chiapas peasant revolts (1990s), 165, 195n.2, 212n.7 Chicano movement, 115–116, 165, 173–174, 176–177, 216n.5 Cholula. See Pyramid of Cholula Chumacero, Ali, 207n.16 Clifford, James, 85, 92, 96, 97–98, 99 Colonialism and neocolonialism, 6, 9, 10, 85, 93, 102, 197–198n.13 Columbus, Christopher, 3 Comercio libre. See Free trade Communism, 213n.11, 215n.3. See also Cuba; Soviet Union Comte, Auguste, 116, 118, 119 Confucius, 122 Conquest. See Spanish Conquest Copernicus, Nicolaus, 155, 156 Copland, Aaron, 81 Cortázar, Julio, 145 Cortés, Hernán, 13, 23–28, 30, 33–34, 37–42, 44, 144, 197n.9, 199n.5 Cortés, Martín, 23, 26 Cortínez, Verónica, 201n.13 Cosmos (A. Humboldt), 86, 87–88, 90, 91, 102, 209n.8, 210–211n.20 Counter–Reformation, 153–154 Couple in the Cage (Gómez–Peña), 178, 216n.4 Creation myths, 98


Criollos, 49–53, 57–58, 62, 66, 69, 71, 79–80, 102, 109, 116, 127, 128, 189, 203n.2, 211n.23 Cristeros, 133 CROM (Revolutionary Workers’ Union), 212n.6 Crucifiction Project (Gómez–Peña), 178, 181, 216n.4 Cuba and Cuban Revolution, 42, 43, 154–155, 158, 206n.16, 214n.1, 215n.3 Cuvier, Georges, 97 Cyrus, 26–27 Dangerous Border Crossers (Gómez– Peña), 216n.5 Darius, 26–27 Daston, Lorraine, 84, 210n.15 Davis, Harold, 197n.10 Davis, Lennard, 203–204n.7 De Man, Paul, 5–6, 7, 12, 13, 138, 140, 186, 192, 210n.17 De Mier, Fray Servando Teresa, 83 De Robinsón a Odiseo (Vasconcelos), 116, 121–123 De Testa, Lilian Alvarez, 205n.9 Dédoublement, 6, 7, 12, 13, 138, 192 Defoe, Daniel, 54–55, 59, 71, 80 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 176 Derrida, Jacques, 96–97, 189, 198n.15 Deterritorialization, 4, 176 Dewey, John, 122 ‘‘Día de las madres’’ (Fuentes), 14–18, 198–199n.18 Díaz, Porfirio, 8, 83, 118, 119, 121, 207n.16 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal: approach of, to writing history, 7, 30–32; compared with Fuentes, 16; compared with Gómara’s history, 22–39, 45, 200n.11, 202n.18; on different accounts of Spanish Conquest, 22–23; encomienda for, 39; feud between Gómara and, 23, 24, 28, 30–31, 35, 38–49, 42, 44; and Las Casas, 200n.11, 202n.18; legal battles of, 4, 21–22, 39, 200n.11; and liminality,

INDEX

12–13, 41–43; literary critics on, 44–46, 201–202n.18; as possible fraud, 200n.12; prose style of, 31– 32, 34–35, 37–39, 45, 200nn.8–9, 200–201n.13; significance of, 45–46 —work: Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, 2, 10, 12–13, 21–46, 75, 198n.16 Didactic dialogue, 60–64, 76–79, 205– 206n.12 Diderot, Denis, 95, 209n.13 Digestive problems, 148–151, 153, 156, 157, 161–164, 189 ‘‘Dispute of the New World,’’ 101–102 Domínguez, Gonzalo, 34 Domínguez Michael, Christopher, 133 Dominicans, 40, 201–202n.18 Don Catrín de la Fachenda (Fernández de Lizardi), 49, 205n.10 Don Quijote (Cervantes), 5, 21, 22, 55, 165, 168, 169, 215n.3 Donoso, José, 158 Durán, Gloria, 199n.18 Eagleton, Terry, 12, 156–157 Echeverría, Esteban, 130 Education: Dewey on, 122; Gómez– Peña on, 184; in Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento, 49–51, 54, 56–57, 60–64, 76–79; Schiller on, 91–92, 210n.17; of Sor Juana, 193; in Soviet Union, 113–114; and Vasconcelos, 113–114, 116, 117, 121–125, 138–140; women in teaching profession, 114 Einstein, Albert, 155, 156 Eliade, Mircea, 11, 144 El–Saffar, Ruth, 166 Emilfork Tobar, Leónidas, 200n.8 Encomiendas and encomenderos, 21, 39, 200n.11, 201n.16 End of the Line (Gómez–Peña), 175 Ense, Varnhagen von, 98, 109, 211n.21 Epic tradition, 45, 202n.20, 203n.6 Erasmus, 215n.3 Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne [Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain]

235

(A. Humboldt), 49, 82, 84, 90, 102, 108, 208n.1 Essentialism, 116–117, 174–175 Ethnography and ethnographic allegory, 92, 96, 97–98, 178 Eutrapely (ready–wit), 68, 74 Fabregat, José Joaquín, 104 Facundismo, 128 Failure: as form of knowledge, 4, 193; and Gómez–Peña, 181, 186–187, 189, 190; ‘‘heuristic’’ failure, 5–8, 189–193; of Latin American dictatorships and ‘‘dirty wars’’ (1970s– 1980s), 189; and liminality, 11–13; in Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento summarized, 77, 79–80; of Madero, 128–136, 138, 140; and Mexican history generally, 1–4, 7, 8, 12–14; and mourning, 188–190; Paz on, 8– 11; recent critical thought on, 4–5; of Santa Anna, 187–189, 190; ‘‘systemic’’ failure, 6; of Vasconcelos, 117, 121, 126–133, 139–140, 189, 213– 214n.14. See also specific authors and titles Fanon, Frantz, 11, 197–198n.13 Fell, Claude, 211n.1 Feminist criticism, 198–199n.18 Fénelon, François de, 54 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín: albures in works by, 63, 71–77, 80; Anderson on, 195n.4; censorship of writings by, 51, 62–63; imprisonment of, 51; journalistic work of, 49, 53, 62–63; literary critics on, 49, 50, 203–205nn.6–10; on magisterial failure, 14; on persistence of status quo in face of revolt, 62–63; and picaresque novel, 2, 49, 58, 60, 204–205n.9; on street life, 4, 50–51, 58–59, 63, 67–77, 204– 205n.9; and Wars of Independence from Spain, 2 —works: Don Catrín de la Fachenda, 49, 205n.10; Noches tristes, 49; El Periquillo Sarniento (Fernández de

236

Lizardi), 2, 49–80, 189, 195n.4; La Quijotita, 49 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 201n.14 Fernández MacGregor, Genaro, 134 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 84, 87, 97 Finley, Karen, 217n.10 Fisher, John, 53, 203n.2 Flood myth, 98–100 Florescano, Enrique, 203n.2 Fool, 165–170, 173, 177, 178, 183–185, 215nn.2–3 Forster, Georg, 87 Foucault, Michel, 3, 66, 155, 167–169, 184, 206n.15, 215nn.1–2 Fox, Claire, 175, 187 Francis I, 39 Franco, Jean, 50, 53, 58, 75, 202n.1, 205n.9 Frank, Waldo, 119, 121 Free trade, 51–53, 58, 62, 64, 67, 69, 71, 75, 78, 79, 203n.2 Freedom of speech, 62–63, 64 Freedom of the press, 62–63, 65, 206n.13 French Revolution, 2 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 17, 81, 188–189, 199n.19 La frontera de cristal (Fuentes), 216n.5 Frye, Northrop, 215n.2 Fuentes, Carlos: and Bakhtin, 198n.15; on Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera, 45; and Boom movement, 145, 154, 158; compared with Díaz, 16; critics of, 157–158, 214–215n.3; and Cuban Revolution, 154; health problems/hypochondria of, 149, 153, 157, 158, 161, 162, 177, 189, 190; on Hidalgo, 14; and liminality, 157; on magisterial failure, 14; on Mexican history, 1, 2, 7, 187, 188, 195n.2; and Neobaroque, 145, 154; and Paz, 214n.3; on Reyes, 120; significance of, 4, 143–144, 158, 162, 186–187 —works: Agua quemada, 14; Cambio de piel, 2, 143–145, 148–150, 153, 156, 157, 159, 161–164, 215n.4; ‘‘Día de las madres,’’ 14–18, 198–199n.18;


La frontera de cristal, 216n.5; La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 14, 15; Myself with Others, 1, 120, 188; La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 145, 156; Paris, la revolución de mayo, 155; La región más transparente, 1, 196n.6; Terra Nostra, 14 Fusco, Coco, 170, 178, 180, 183, 216– 217nn.8–9 ‘‘El fusilado’’ (Vasconcelos), 130–131 Gage, Thomas, 81 Gambling, 67–69, 71, 73–74, 75, 207n.18, 207–208n.20 García Canclini, Néstor, 4–5, 196n.5, 196–197n.7, 207n.16 García Icazbalceta, Joaquín, 83 García Márquez, Gabriel, 83, 145 Garden near Xilotepec, 37–38 Gates, Henry Louis, 73, 207n.19, 208n.21 Genética, Poyesis, 175 Genette, Gérard, 196n.4 Genius, 94–96, 209nn.11–13 Geological origins of the earth, 98 Gerbi, Antonello, 101, 197n.10 Gil Blas. See L’histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (Le Sage) Gil Sánchez, Isabel, 203n.2 Gilman, Stephen, 35, 44, 201n.18 Glantz, Margo, 200n.8, 201n.15 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 84, 85, 92, 97, 210nn.15–16, 210n.18 Gómara, Francisco López de. See López de Gómara, Francisco Gómez–Peña, Guillermo: and audience, 178, 181–185, 216–217nn.8–9; border crossing in performance art of, 2, 4, 7, 170–185, 216–217nn.6–10; and Chicano movement, 216n.5; on Chicanoization, 165, 177; documentation of performances by, 170–171, 215–216n.4; education of, 171; first U.S. performance by, 173; and immigrant experience, 171; on intervention and performance art,

INDEX

169; opposition to essentialisms by, 174–175; and parrhesia (feigned reluctance to speak candidly), 178; and performance of failure, 181, 186– 187, 189, 190; photographs of, 172, 179–181 —works: Border brujo, 170, 215–216n.4; ‘‘Califas,’’ 176–177; Couple in the Cage, 178, 216n.4; Crucifiction Project, 178, 181, 216n.4; Dangerous Border Crossers, 216n.5; End of the Line, 175; Guatinaui World Tour, 170, 177, 178, 180, 183, 216n.4; ‘‘Multicultural Paradigm,’’ 175, 181; ‘‘My First Performance Ever,’’ 172–173; New World Border, 165, 173, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 216n.4, 217n.8; Seminar on Museum Race Relations, 182–183, 216n.4; Temple of Confessions, 178, 216n.4; Warrior for Gringostroika, 171–173, 175, 176–177, 181, 184, 185, 189, 215n.4; Year of the White Bear, 179 Góngora, Luis de, 156, 161 González, Aníbal, 204nn.7–9 González Casanova, Pablo, 6 González Echevarría, Roberto, 3–4, 13, 159, 199n.2, 203n.7, 214n.1 Gouffier, Marie–Gabriel–Auguste– Florent de Choiseul, 103 Goya, Francisco de, 50 Grande Place de Mexico, 104–107, 190 Greenblatt, Stephen, 30, 44, 201–202n.18 Greene, Thomas, 201n.14 Grijalba, Juan de, 32–33 Gruzinski, Serge, 147 Guachinangos (lower class), 64, 104, 106, 108, 109 Guatinaui World Tour (Gómez–Peña), 170, 177, 178, 180, 183, 216n.4 Guattari, Felix, 4, 176 Gutiérrez González, Noé, 207n.16 Hagen–Hein, Wolfgang, 209n.12 Henestrosa, Andrés, 131–132 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 118, 120, 135, 146, 154, 213n.10

237

Herder, Johann Gottfreid von, 84, 91, 101, 211n.20 Herodotus, 38 Heteroglossia, 63, 74–75, 79 ‘‘Heuristic’’ failure, 5–8, 189–193. See also Failure Hidalgo, Miguel, 1, 14 Himmerich y Valencia, Robert, 201n.15 L’histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (Le Sage), 54, 55–56, 68 Historia de la conquista de México (López de Gómara), 22–39, 200n.9 Historia general de las Indias (López de Gómara), 23, 27 Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Díaz): Aztecs in, 28, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 201–202n.18; beginning of, 22, 42, 43, 201n.17; Botello the astrologer in, 28–29; catalogue of horses in, 32; celebration and mock–battle in Great Plaza of Mexico in, 39–43, 75; collective voice in, 30, 199–200n.7; comments on Gómara in, 23, 24, 28, 30–31, 35, 38–39, 44; compared with Gómara’s history, 22–39, 45; Cortés in, 25–26, 30, 34, 39–42, 44; critics on, 44–46, 201–202n.18; editions of, 199n.3, 199–200n.7; end of, 39–44; fictionalizing impulse in, 200–201n.12–13; as first–person testimonial, 30–31; fort of San Juan de Ulúa in, 42; garden near Xilotepec in, 37–38; human sacrifice in, 36; imprisonment of mutineer in, 34; and liminality, 12– 13; pacification campaign after fall of Tenochtitlán in, 36, 37–38; pathos in, 44; prose style of, 31–32, 34–35, 37–39, 45, 200nn.8–9, 200–201n.13; references to external sources in, 35, 38–39; as romance, 202n.20; significance of, 2, 10, 43–44, 45–46, 198n.16; similarities between Gómara’s text and, 23, 35–38, 200n.11, 202n.18; soldiers in, 34, 35, 36, 37–38, 42–43; spy missions in, 35, 200n.10; time spent on writing, 35

238

Homer, 38 Humboldt, Alexander von: and analogy, 85, 91–92, 96, 98; ascent of Mount Chimborazo by, 82, 101; on blindness to natural world, 100–101; on Catholics, 100, 103; on church in Mexico, 93, 96; on colonial government of Mexico, 102; critics of, 85, 93, 209n.9; galvanic experiments by, 95, 209n.12; and geological origins of the earth, 98; on ‘‘God– rock,’’ 94, 96; and humility, 14, 85, 190; illustrations in works by, 104–109; on Indians, 88, 89, 96, 102, 209n.7; and Mexican Independence, 2, 82–83, 102, 208n.4; on myth of the flood, 98–100; on national character, 84–85, 91–92, 94; on natural bridge in Mexico, 93–94; and naturalized self, 87–88; and obsession with the measurable, 93; on population of Mexico, 96, 209n.14; on rulers, 106–109; significance of, 4, 81–83, 109; on street life in Mexico, 64, 108; and subjectivity, 86–97, 102–103, 211n.24; and theory of sight/perception, 86– 96; on toponyms, 101; on volcanic ranges, 210n.19 —works: Ansichten der Natur [Aspects of Nature], 84–85, 91–92, 99, 103, 208n.5, 209n.11; Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, 49, 82, 84, 90, 102, 108, 208n.1; Kosmos, 86, 87–88, 90, 91, 102, 209n.8, 210–211n.20; Letters, 98, 109; Reise, 93–94, 96, 99, 100, 106–107, 209n.14, 209n.10, 209n.14, 210n.19; Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent [Personal Narrative], 86–87, 93, 211n.24; ‘‘Vital Force or the Rhodian Genius,’’ 94–96, 209nn.11–12; Vues des cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 104–107, 209n.6 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 209n.8


Iglesia, Ramón, 200n.8, 201n.17 ‘‘Iguazú’’ (Pellicer), 137 Iliad, 21, 32 Imagined communities, 3, 195n.4 Immigrants, 171, 176–177, 216n.5 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 171, 172 Independence. See Mexican Independence Indians: assimilation of, 212n.5; Bernal Díaz on, 35, 40, 41, 200n.10, 201n.15; and Chiapas peasant revolts (1990s), 165, 195n.2, 212n.7; Humboldt on, 88, 89, 96, 102, 209n.7; Pre–Columbian codices of, 88, 89, 90, 96; Vasconcelos on, 116, 117, 124, 127, 212nn.5–6. See also Aztecs Indigenismo, 212n.5 Indigestion. See Digestive problems INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), 171, 172 Irony, 32–33, 165, 186, 200n.9 Isla, Father José Francisco de, 54 Iturrigaray, José de, 208n.1 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 55, 203n.6 Jiménez, Alfredo, 73, 203n.4, 206n.16, 207n.17 Journalism, 49, 53, 62–63, 65, 204n.8, 206n.13 Juana, Sor, 150–151, 159, 164, 186, 193 Juárez, Benito, 140 Kaiser, Walter, 215n.2 Kant, Immanuel, 84, 101 Keats, John, 5, 209n.13 Kermode, Frank, 12 Kester, Grant, 217n.10 Kingsborough, Edward King, 88, 90 Kintana, Garibay, 46 Kosmos (A. Humboldt), 86, 87–88, 90, 91, 102, 209n.8, 210–211n.20 Krauze, Enrique, 82, 109, 113, 128, 132, 158, 198n.17, 198n.14, 212n.7, 213–214nn.14–15, 214n.3 Kristeva, Julia, 155 Kuhnheim, Jill, 216n.7, 217n.10

INDEX

La Vega, Garcilaso de, 44 El laberinto de la soledad (Paz), 1, 3, 8–11, 75, 187, 196n.6, 197n.11, 197–198n.13, 207n.16, 217n.1 Larra, Mariano de, 50 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 200n.11, 202n.18 Lawrence, D. H., 81 Le Clézio, J. M. G., 44 Le Sage, Alain, 54, 55–56, 68 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 84 Lenin, Vladimir Ilych, 114 Léperos (street people), 50, 58, 64–66, 71–72, 77, 204–205n.9 Letanías del atardecer (Vasconcelos), 211n.3 Lévi–Strauss, Claude, 155, 198n.15 Lewis, Robert, 26 Lezama Lima, José, 146 Licenciado (holy fool), 165–170, 173, 177, 178, 183–185, 215n.3 Liminality: and Bernal Díaz, 12–13, 41–43, 201n.16; and border crossing, 183, 184–185, 187; definition of, 11; and failure, 11–13; Foucault on, 66; and Fuentes, 157; and licenciado, 167–169; in literary theories, 198n.15; Turner on, 11, 41, 162, 167, 201n.16, 214n.2. See also Carnival and carnivalesque Lisboa, Antonio Francisco de, 146 Lissitzky, El, 114 Literacy and reading, 3, 55, 114, 125– 126, 138, 195n.4, 213n.12. See also Education Liu, Eric, 174 Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernández de. See Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 212n.6 López de Gómara, Francisco, 22– 39, 200nn.8–9, 200n.11, 201n.14, 202n.18, 202n.20 López Velarde, Ramón, 113 Lottería callers, 54, 203n.4 Lowry, Malcolm, 81 Lucan, 202n.20 Lukács, Georg, 55, 203n.6

239

Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich, 114 Lyon, George, 64–66 Lynch, John, 203n.2 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 23 Madero, Francisco I., 128–136, 138, 140, 189, 213nn.12–13 Madness of licenciado, 165–170, 173, 177, 178, 183–185 Magallón, Mario, 208n.4 Mañach, Jorge, 206n.16 Maravall, José Antonio, 153 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 6 Martí, José, 115 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, 6 Marxist criticism, 5, 58, 203n.6 Massacre of Tlatelolco, 195n.2 Mauss, Marcel, 75, 207–208n.20 Maya civilization, 102 Memorias (Vasconcelos), 7, 114, 123– 125, 127–131, 135, 139–140, 211n.2, 212n.8, 213nn.12–13 Mendigos (beggars), 64, 66, 70 Mentz de Boege, Brígida, 206n.14 Merchant class. See Middle class Mestizaje (racial hybridity), 116, 146, 174 Mexican–American War (1846–1848), 2, 3, 187, 188, 195n.2, 197n.12 Mexican Independence, 1, 2, 3, 14, 53, 78–79, 187 Mexican Revolution (1910), 2, 6, 7, 187 Mexicanidad, 4, 8, 83, 120, 196n.6, 206n.16 Middle class, 52–55, 57–58, 65–66, 71, 76–78, 116, 124, 127, 203n.2. See also Criollos Milton, John, 5 Mistral, Gabriela, 114 Moctezuma, 25, 27 Modernity and modernism, 2, 109, 184, 196n.5, 197n.11 Modotti, Tina, 81 Molloy, Sylvia, 123, 212n.8 Monsiváis, Carlos, 76, 207n.16, 207n.19, 211n.1 Montaner, Carlos Alberto, 197n.8

240

Montañeses, 52, 58, 65–66, 67, 69, 203nn.2–3 Montenegro, Roberto, 114 Mora, José María Luis, 83 Mora, Sonia, 205n.9 Moraga, Cherríe, 174 Moraña, Mabel, 205n.9 Morla, Francisco de, 28 Morris, William, 119 Motolinía, 201n.14 Mourning, 188–190 La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), 14, 15 ‘‘Multicultural Paradigm’’ (Gómez– Peña), 175, 181 Mumford, Lewis, 119, 120 Muralists, Mexican, 113, 114–115, 196n.6, 213n.11 Museo Nacional de Antropología, 196n.6 ‘‘My First Performance Ever’’ (Gómez– Peña), 172–173 Myself with Others (Fuentes), 1, 120, 188 Myth, 28, 46, 98–100, 143–145 Napoleon Bonaparte, 97, 108 National character, 84–85, 91–92, 94 National University, 113, 123 Nationalism, 2–3, 195n.4, 198n.14, 211n.4 Naturalized self, 87–88 Naturphilosophie, 84, 87, 97 Nazism, 116, 143, 144 Neobaroque, 145–157, 159 Neocolonialism. See Colonialism and neocolonialism New World Border (Gómez–Peña), 165, 173, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 216n.4, 217n.8 Noches tristes (Fernández de Lizardi), 49 Novelas ejemplares (Cervantes), 165– 170, 173, 178, 183–184 La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Fuentes), 145, 156 Objectivity, 84, 97, 118, 210n.15 Obregón, Alvaro, 113


Obregonistas, 133 Odyssey, 28 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 1–2 Olid, Cristóbal de, 24–25 Orozco, José Clemente, 114 Ortega, Julio, 145 Ortega y Medina, Juan, 208n.4 Ortiz, Fernando, 174, 198n.15, 206n.16 Otherness, 44, 85, 92, 96, 177, 181, 201–202n.18 Ovid, 81 Padilla, Herberto, 158 Pain. See Body; Digestive problems PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional), 195n.2 Paris, la revolución de mayo (Fuentes), 155 Parker, Alexander, 55 Parrhesia (feigned reluctance to speak candidly), 178 Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), 195n.2 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 157, 187, 195n.2, 217n.2 Paul, St., 68 Paz, Octavio: on albures, 75, 207n.16, 208n.22; on Baroque, 151; Eliade and Soustelle as influences on, 144; and Fuentes, 214n.3; influence of Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera on, 45; and language of religious ritual, 11, 198n.14; on Mexican character and history, 1, 8–11, 18, 75; on mexicanidad, 206n.16; modernist sensibility of, 197n.11; and Neobaroque theories, 146; and ‘‘Pachuco’’ culture of Los Angeles, 216n.5; on realistic pessimism, 3 —works: Los hijos del limo, 197n.11; El laberinto de la soledad, 1, 3, 8–11, 75, 187, 196n.6, 197n.11, 197– 198n.13, 207n.16, 217n.1; Lévi– Strauss o el festín de Esopo, 198n.15; Postdata, 198n.14, 198n.17 Pelados, 73, 204–205n.9, 206n.16 Pellicer, Carlos, 135, 137

INDEX

Perception, theory of, 86–96 Pérez, Antonio, 109, 211n.25 Pérez–Firmat, Gustavo, 11–12, 174, 175, 198n.15 Performance art. See Gómez–Peña, Guillermo El Periquillo Sarniento (Fernández de Lizardi): Anderson on, 195n.4; change process in, 63–64, 67, 77– 80; criollos in, 49–54, 57–58, 62, 79–80, 189; critics on, 49, 50, 203– 205nn.6–10; Don Antonio Sánchez in, 52–53, 57–58, 62, 67, 70; double voice in, 58–64; education and didactic dialogue in, 49–50, 54, 56–57, 60–64, 76–79; ending of, 78–80; English translation of, 58; failure in summarized, 77, 79–80; gambling in, 67–69, 71, 73–74; island of Saucheofú in, 69–71, 78; Januario in, 59–60, 61, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77; journalistic tone of, 204n.8; language in, 50–51, 58, 63, 71–78, 202n.1, 205n.9; Martín Pelayo in, 59, 70; moral examples and exhortations in, 50– 51, 58–64, 205n.10; non–narrative sources of, 54; Perico in, 52, 56– 59, 61, 64, 67–80, 202n.1, 204n.8; as picaresque novel, 2, 49, 58, 60, 204n.7, 204–205n.9; purpose of, 49–50; significance of, 204–205n.9; street life in, 4, 50–51, 58–59, 63, 67–77, 204–205n.9 Personal Narrative of Travels to Equinoctial Regions of America [Relation historique] (A. Humboldt), 86–87, 93, 211n.24 Peter Mártyr, 201n.14 Petrarch, 151 Philip II, 109 Piazza, Luis Guillermo, 158 Picaresque and pícaro, 2, 49, 54, 55–56, 58, 60, 127, 166, 170, 184, 203– 204n.7, 204–205n.9 Piranesi, Giambattista, 104 Pius II, 23 Platonism, 4, 115, 121, 122, 134

241

Plotinus, 122, 138 Plutarch, 17, 38 Poisoning, 33–34 Polybius, 26, 38 Poniatowska, Elena, 148–150, 153, 157, 158, 161 Porter, Katherine Ann, 58 Portilla, Jorge, 196n.6, 206–207n.16 Posada, José Guadalupe, 8 Positivism, 116–119, 138 Postcolonialism, 58 Postmodernism, 4, 165, 186, 187, 196nn.5–6 Poverty, 206n.14 Pratt, Mary Louise, 82, 93 Prescott, William Hickling, 200n.8 PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), 157, 187, 195n.2, 217n.2 Primitive, 197n.11 Pulque and pulquerías, 64, 74, 76 Pyramid of Cholula, 104, 105, 144–145, 147, 159, 161, 162 Qué es el communismo (Vasconcelos), 211n.3 La Quijotita (Fernández de Lizardi), 49 Quint, David, 202n.20 Rabelais, François, 165, 198n.15 Race: and essentialism, 116–117, 174–175; in Gómez–Peña’s performance art, 178–183; and mestizaje (racial hybridity), 116, 146, 174; and Nazism, 116; and ‘‘raza cósmica’’ (cosmic race), 115–116, 174; Vasconcelos on, 113, 115–117, 127, 138, 211–212nn.5–6. See also Aztecs; Indians Rama, Angel, 198n.17 Ramos, Samuel, 4, 196n.6, 206n.16 Raynal, Guillaume–Thomas, 9 ‘‘Raza cósmica’’ (cosmic race), 115–116, 174 La raza cósmica (Vasconcelos), 113, 115–117, 119, 121, 127, 128, 134–138, 211–212n.5 Reading. See Literacy and reading

242

Reformation, 153–154 La región más transparente (Fuentes), 1, 196n.6 Reise (A. Humboldt), 93–94, 96, 99, 100, 106–107, 209n.14, 209n.10, 209n.14, 210n.19 Relaciónes, 22, 199n.2, 201n.14 Relajo (hell–raising), 206–207n.16 Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent [Personal Narrative] (A. Humboldt), 86–87, 93, 211n.24 Renan, Ernest, 7, 192 Repetition compulsion, 17, 199n.19 Revolution, 154–157, 215n.3. See also Cuba; Mexican Revolution (1910); Soviet Union Revolutionary Workers’ Union (CROM), 212n.6 Revueltas, José, 195n.3 Reyes, Alfonso, 45, 81, 118, 120, 126, 135, 196n.6, 198n.16, 204n.9, 212n.10 Rites of passage, 41, 171, 190, 198n.15. See also Border crossing Ritter, Carl, 109 Rivera, Diego, 114, 115, 196n.6 Robertson, William, 9 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 54–55, 59, 71, 80 Rodó, José Enrique, 45, 115, 165 Rodriguez, Richard, 216n.5 Rolland, Romain, 133 Romantics, 83, 97, 205n.11 Rosales, Luis, 169 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 7, 54, 80, 204n.9 Rubenstein, Anne, 217n.2 Rubio, Darío, 206–207n.16 Ruiz Castañeda, María del Carmen, 208n.3 Rulfo, Juan, 164, 190–192 Sáenz de Santa María, Father Carmelo, 199n.3, 200n.7 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 44 St. Pierre, Bernardin, 101 Sainz, Gustavo, 143, 162


Saldívar, José, 170 Salgado, Cesar, 146 Salomón, Noel, 205n.9 Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, 147 Sandoval, Gonzalo de, 24–25, 37, 38 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 187– 189, 190, 192 Santamaría, Francisco, 203n.4 Saragates, 64, 108 Sarduy, Severo, 145–148, 151, 153–157, 159, 198n.15, 214n.1 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 9, 13 Scarry, Elaine, 151, 153 Schelling, Friedrich von, 84, 87, 97 Schiller, Friedrich, 84, 85, 91–92, 94, 210n.17 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 127, 135 Scientific gaze, 86–87 Scientific method, 84, 97, 102, 210nn.15–16 Seminar on Museum Race Relations (Gómez–Peña), 182–183, 216n.4 Shakespeare, William, 157, 165 Shell, Marc, 203n.5 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5 Shumway, Nicolas, 205n.10 Sierra, Justo, 83 Sifuentes, Roberto, 178, 181 Sight, theory of, 86–96 Signifyin(g), 73, 208n.21 Simpson, Lesley Byrd, 25, 187–188, 200n.9 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 114, 115, 196n.6 Skirius, John, 131 Skrine, Peter, 215n.1 Solís, Antonio de, 200n.8 Sor Juana, 150–151, 159, 164, 186, 193 Soustelle, Jacques, 144 Soviet Union, 113–114, 155 Spanish Conquest, 2, 3, 10, 12–13, 21– 46, 75, 146–147, 187, 198n.16, 199n.7, 200n.10 Spell, Jefferson Rea, 54, 204n.9, 205n.10 Spengler, Oswald, 115, 116 Stabb, Martin, 9 Stafford, Barbara, 86

INDEX

Stavans, Ilan, 174 Street life in Mexico, 4, 50–51, 58–59, 63, 64–77, 108, 109, 204–205n.9 Subjectivity, 86–97, 102–103, 210n.15, 211n.24 Sypher, Wylie, 154 Tapia, Andrés de, 201n.14 Tatlin, Vladimir, 114 Taylor, Diana, 178, 217n.9 Tel Quel group, 155 Temple of Confessions (Gómez–Peña), 178, 216n.4 Tenochtitlán, 25–26, 30, 36, 201n.18 Teresa, St., 151, 152, 153 Terra Nostra (Fuentes), 14 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 209n.9 Todorov, Tzvetan, 201n.18 Toledo Cathedral, 159–161 Tolsá, Manuel, 104 Tolstoy, Aleksey N., 128 Tomé, Narciso, 159–161 Torres Villarroel, Diego de, 54 Torri, Julio, 135 Trade. See Free trade Travel accounts, 64–66, 72–73, 86– 87, 103–109. See also Humboldt, Alexander von Trotsky, Leon, 156, 157 Turner, Victor, 11, 12, 41, 167, 201n.16, 214n.2 UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), 171 Unamuno, Miguel de, 200n.8 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 171 University of Wisconsin, 216n.5 Urbina, Luis G., 204n.9 Utopias, 12, 66, 69–70, 119, 120–21, 140, 157, 206n.15 Valdés, M. E., 198–199n.18 Van Gennep, Arnold, 198n.15 Vasconcelos, José: as caudillo, 14; conservatism of, 211n.3; and contradictions between stated ideals and

243

practice, 126–130, 133–134, 177; critics of, 133, 212n.6; on education, 116, 121–125, 138–139; failures of, 2, 117, 121, 126–133, 139–140, 189, 213–214n.14; on Indians, 116, 117, 124, 127, 212nn.5–6; influence of Bernal Díaz on, 45; in Liu’s Accidental Asian, 174; and Madero, 128–136, 138, 140, 189, 213nn.12–13; on Mexican government in 1922, 213n.11; and Mexican Muralists, 113, 114–115, 213n.11; as minister of public education, 113–114, 117, 121– 123, 138–139, 211n.1, 212–213n.10; mother of, 212n.8; and National University, 113, 123; on nationalism, 211n.4; patronage of arts by, 113, 114–115; Platonism of, 4, 115, 121, 122, 134; and positivism, 116–119, 138; presidential campaign of, 117, 128, 131–133; on race, 113, 115–117, 127, 138, 211–212nn.5–6; on reading and books, 125–126, 138, 213n.12; and Revolution of 1910–1920, 2; travel in South America by, 127, 135–136; on waterfalls of Iguazú, 135–138; wealth of, 213n.12; youth and education of, 121, 123–126, 139–140 —works: Breve historia de México, 213n.13; De Robinsón a Odiseo, 116, 121–123; ‘‘Don Gabino Barreda y las ideas contemporáneas,’’ 118– 119; ‘‘El fusilado,’’ 130–131; Letanías del atardecer, 211n.3; Memorias, 7, 114, 123–125, 127–131, 135, 139–140, 211n.2, 212n.8, 213nn.12–13; Qué es el communismo, 211n.3; La raza cósmica, 113, 115–117, 119, 121, 127, 128, 134–138, 211–212n.5 Velázquez, Diego, 199n.5

244

Veliz, Claudio, 52 Vico, Giambattista, 91, 215n.2 Vidriera as licenciado, 165–170, 173, 177, 178, 183–185 Villanueva, Tino, 216n.5 Virgil, 50, 120, 126, 202n.20 ‘‘Vital Force or the Rhodian Genius’’ (A. Humboldt), 94–96, 209nn.11–12 Vives, Juan Luis, 26 Vogeley, Nancy, 62, 205n.9 Volpi, Jorge, 214–215n.3 Voltaire, 56, 101 Vues des cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (A. Humboldt), 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 104–107, 209n.6 Wagner, Roy, 97–98 Warrior for Gringostroika (Gómez– Peña), 171–173, 175, 176–177, 181, 184, 185, 189, 215n.4 Watt, Ian, 55, 195n.4 Williams, Raymond L., 5, 195n.4, 196n.5, 203n.6, 215n.4 Winckelmann, Johann, 210n.17 Wordsworth, William, 96 Yáñez, Agustín, 196n.6, 204–205n.9 Year of the White Bear (Gómez–Peña), 179 Yeats, William Butler, 140 Young Americans, 119–121, 123, 126 Zamacois, Niceto de, 207n.16 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 154, 159, 212n.9 Zapata, Emiliano, 115 Zapatistas, 133, 165, 195n.2, 212n.7 Zaragates, 66 Zea, Alfonso, 196n.6 Zea, Leopoldo, 116, 208n.4


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