This volume is a reissue (with a new introduction) of a work published in 1954, but never reviewed in this journal. Like Leopoldo Zea’s study of positivism and Luis Villoro’s of indigenismo, it is a product of the seminar in the history of ideas at El Colegio de México directed by the Spanish refugee philosopher José Gaos. Like his colleagues, López Cámara is concerned with identifying critical aspects of the national mentality, in this case the development of a “Mexican political consciousness,” which he equates with liberalism. López Cámara locates the first stage of this development in the eighteenth century antagonism between creole and European Spaniard, culminating in the call for a national congress in 1808. Its second stage appeared in 1810-1812, when middle-class insurgents, calling themselves “Americans,” made common cause with Indians in repudiating three centuries of colonialism. The third stage was the burgeoning of a “liberal consciousness” in 1820, in which the revolutionary goal now became the positive transformation of society following the dictates of liberalism. Independence, López Cámara asserts, was not the ultimate goal of the revolution, but only an initiation of the true process of social regeneration in the country.
A book such as that of López Cámara is frustrating to a “scientific” historian, whose methods and assumptions are alien to the philosophical historicism which inspires these Mexican intellectuals. López Cámara disarms us by arguing that the “liberal consciousness” in Mexico did not result from the impact of European liberal philosophy, but rather that it was the “authentic,” “collective,” or “popular” response of men who experienced the contradictions of the colonial system. Such concrete social experience “constituted the ideological foundation favorable to liberal ideas.” While appearing to argue the social derivation of ideas, López Cámara is in reality constructing an autonomous and idealist dialectical process which begins as “creole” versus “European Spaniard” and culminates in the emergence of a new “collective mentality,” or the transformation of the “Creole insurgent” into a “new historical subject: liberal Man.”
The method is disconcerting in its disregard (ironically) for what the historian calls context. López Cámara’s argument is based on highly selective evidence, memorials, tracts, and pamphlets from the years 1724, 1771, 1808, 1810-1812, and 1820. We get no sense of the creole rejection of Hidalgo or of the conservative culmination of independence in 1821. The Plan of Iguala is not mentioned. We see Abad y Queipo as a clerical reactionary after 1810, but not as a Bourbon reformer before 1810. Particularly misleading (in light of post-independence evidence) is the assertion that by 1821 “a vindicating indigenismo becomes fused with the ideals of liberalism, as one of its social elements.”
López Cámaras analysis of creole attitudes is frequently illuminating, but in general the book is of more value for the student of contemporary ideas in Mexico than for the student of the independence era.
