The 1970s in Mexico have been graced by the SepSetentas series, an extraordinary publishing venture which has illumined lo mexicano at minimum cost to the reader. Sponsored by the Secretaría de Ed cación Pública, hundreds of these pocketbooks have appeared at the rate of about one a week and in large runs (10-60,000). Designed primarily for the university student population, scholars also benefit by a wide spectrum of orginal monographs, reprints of classics in Mexican (and some foreign) studies, documentary collections, and symposia in the arts, humanities and social sciences. They are generally well documented, but lack bibliographies and indices.
The books here under review suggest the scope of SepSetentas. The genres are themselves diverse: a monograph in the history of ideas (Brading), a doctoral dissertation (Macias), and a posthumous collection of essays (Miranda). By nationality the authors underscore the cosmopolitan nature of the series: an Englishman, a North American, and a Spaniard. While by genre, by birth and, as we shall see, by theme and interpretation, the works are distinctive; collectively they represent a common commitment to Mexican history. Their diversity, however, requires that each volume be reviewed separately.
David Brading explores the roots of Mexican identity back into the sixteenth century and traces the transformation of criollo patriotism into a well articulated—if frustrated—protonationalism in the early years of the Republic. His analysis of ideologies and ideologues —most notably Padre Mier—must be understood against the Cambridge scholar’s meticulous research in demography and socio-economic history. He is, above all, perplexed by the inability of nineteenth-century Mexicans to formulate a national consensus which would solve the problems of social and economic inequality inherited from the colony. More specifically, Brading is concerned with the failure of liberalism and the postponement of radical social change into the twentieth century.
Brading finds the emergence of criollismo in the works of Juan de Torquemada and Gonzalo Gómez de Cervantes, the legends of Quetzalcóatl, and, of course, the Guadalupan myths. After skilful development of these and other strains, Brading describes the culmination of criollo self awareness. He emphasizes the 1771 Representación of the Cabildo of Mexico (but fails to mention its reissue in 1792, which would have strengthened his case), the ire of the exiled Jesuits, and Clavigero’s rebuttal to the charges of climatic induced degeneracy among Americans proposed by Robertson, Raynal and Buffon. Unlike Peru, where Tupac Amaru II dampened the ardor of criollos to associate with the pre-Columbians, Mexicans appropriated the Aztec past. This neo-Aztecism (here Brading follows Phelan) was to distinguish Mexican from South American insurgent ideology.
In Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Brading finds the culmination of criollo patriotism. He treats Mier’s ardent defense of Guadalupe’s link with the Apostle St. Thomas (to free the Aztec past from the Devil), his associations with Jovellanos and Blanco White during his European exile, and Mier’s return and vindication in the 1820s. Brading presents Mier as “un aristócrata republicano, un católico liberal y un nacionalista mexicano” who stood between Alamán and Gómez Farias. Mier, however, could not overcome “la profunda ambigüedad inherente al patriotismo criollo, con su doble insistencia en la ascendencia conquistadora y en la antigüedad india” (p. 147).
Finally Brading argues provocatively that the development of Mexican nationalism was attentuated after independence because criollo patriotism was instinctively rejected by the new liberal ideologues and their mestizo supporters. The liberals, however, could not make their European-inspired, individualistic, and laissez-faire ideology engender a cohesive national spirit. The past rejected, Mexico floundered for two generations waiting the emergence of an autochthonous nationalism. Based as it is on a wide range of documentary and modern sources, Brading’s hypothesis is fuel for a new and stimulating debate on the nature of lo mexicano.
Anna Macías wrote her dissertation at Columbia nearly a decade before its publication. Essentially unrevised, the book’s strengths and weaknesses are consequently placed in relief by the passage of time. What is admirable about her study of the origins, character and aftermath of the Apatzingán Constitution of 1814 is due, in part, to her major reliance upon primary sources and on her critical stance viz-à-viz patriotic mythology. The 1960s and early 1970s were, however, a fecund time for Mexican historiography, and it is regrettable that Professor Macías did not incorporate pertinent findings. That the works of Ernesto de la Torre and Ernesto Lemoine which treat Apatzingán directly go unacknowledged is more difficult to understand than the absence of studies which illumine the era more generally.
Macias attacks the popular assumption that the Apatzingán Constitution was the collaborative work of harmonious and united insurgents. She demonstrates that Morelos, Rayón, Bustamante and Cos never attended the drafting sessions. With Berduzco and Liceaga too occupied with the frail finances of the movement, the Constitution promulgated in Apatzingán (but drafted elsewhere) was really the work of Quintana Roo, Herrera, Alderete, Castañeda, Ponce de León and Zárate.
That the framers should be so few and so divorced from the military leadership are keys to the larger problem of constitutional intent. In her well-organized and crisply written narrative Macías argues that from 1808 to 1820 the anti-peninsular forces shared a common error. All leaders believed that “la única autoridad posible es la autoridad absoluta ya sea que la ejerza una junta, un caudillo o una legislatura” (p. 23). Through the troubled era this tenet fed dissension. Hidalgo and Rayón were leaders unwilling or incapable of sharing absolute power. Even Morelos was suspected by the Congress. The 1814 document is cast in the fight of criollo civilian reaction to the military caudillo, its authors inspired to establish “un sistema de gobierno que reemplazaría el desacreditado despotismo de Rayón y Morelos” (p. 117).
As Macías points out, Article 4 was designed to prohibit a dictatorship in the nascent republic. What recent scholarly emphasis on social history has indicated, however, is that the power of extended families was often greater than that of individuals. The framers of Article 4 were conscious of this; but Macías does not elaborate. Her extensive evaluation of ideological sources, acute as it is, might also have been enriched by recent research into intellectual history.
Although José Miranda wrote a number of books before his death in 1967, including El tributo indígena en la Nueva España. . ., he is perhaps best remembered for his incisive essays and short monographs. It is fortunate, therefore, that these twelve essays, first published between 1944 and 1961, should be reprinted together with Miranda’s complete bibliography.
Guillermo Palacios, Bernardo García and Andrés Lira, the compilers of this memorial volume and authors of an appreciative sketch of Miranda, have grouped the essays under: Indian Society, Religious Life, Economic Life, and From the Enlightenment to Independence. Collectively the essays reveal the legal training of one of those Spanish exiles who made the “second discovery of the New World” and who contributed so much to Mexico’s scholarly florescence in the generation after the fall of Madrid. Superbly organized, succinctly presented and richly documented, each essay is a perfect lawyer’s brief.
Some of the essays are sharply critical. In a paper on Indian acculturation (1961), Miranda unsheathed a two-edged critique of historians and anthropologists: historians for their Eurocentric perception of the post conquest epoch and their inattention to the dynamics of syncretism; anthropologists for their systematic descriptions without heed for the historic development of man. Publications since then suggest that scholars in both disciplines got Miranda’s message. Of special value are Miranda’s explorations of Indian demography, property and identity which marked him, a lawyer at that, among those postwar scholars who went beyond the Recopilación to discover the reality of colonial existence. Quite as valuable are his pieces on Indian responses to Christian evangelism; the persecution of Fray Alonso Cabello, a Mexican exponent of Erasmus; and the political influence of Rousseau during independence.
