Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano

David Brading’s newest triptych gives concise, graceful summaries of the literature of Creole patriotism as it developed into a mestizo protonationalism at Independence. Like other Spanish Americans in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Mexican Creoles wrote as heirs dispossessed of their fathers’ illusions of seigneory and created an arsenal of assertions against Peninsular tyranny. Uniquely in Mexico, Brading argues, the Catholic Church provided a tradition of ideas, as well as cadres of guerrilla priests, to fight for the break with Spain. Churchmen created the characteristically Mexican elements of Creole patriotism: (1) Neo-Aztecism, (2) Guadalupism, and (3) denigration of the Spanish conquistadores. By endowing Mexico with a neoclassical Aztec past, la monarquía indiana, and by associating St. Thomas Apostle with Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe with a lost pre-Hispanic Mariolatry, churchmen forged for Mexico a Christian Aztec past disassociated from Spain. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier politicized these Creole-in-digenist themes, reiterated the missionary defense of the Indian as the nation’s original social compact, and justified an independent republic in terms of the restoration of the Mexican, Christian nation of Anáhuac. After Independence, Brading tells us, Mier’s ideas represented a middle ground, somewhere between Lucas Alamán’s ultramontane, pro-Spanish “reactionary” position and the anticlerical “Jacobin,” pro-U.S. liberalism of Lorenzo de Zavala and Valentín Gómez Farias.

This is a book about failure. Brading asserts that Mier failed, protonationalism failed, and Mexican liberalism failed. Mier’s “instinctive” protonationalism failed for several reasons. Mexico’s many classes and ethnic groups were united only in myth, never in action. Mier was not a systematic thinker, he did not attract disciples, and he had not read German:

Brading concludes that Mier’s Jansenist (liberal Catholic, national Church) republicanism and his historical Creole-indigenism never came together convincingly enough to create a populist conservatism. Lacking such a conservative challenge, Mexican liberalism failed, its social reforms failed, and an opportunity to create a program of agrarian socialism failed. Brading promises to analyze the ideology and composition of nineteenth-century liberalism. This he fails to do.

The basis for failure is contained in Part III. Brading says that Mexican liberalism failed to change the basic structure of land tenure (p. 162); it had no “positive” theory of government (p. 170); and it failed to express the will of its followers because its ideology was nothing but an ideology developed to satisfy the ambitions and aspirations of a European bourgeoisie (p. 199). While these are simple assertions, Brading’s “proof” rests upon an intricate analogy to Russia.

Brading would have us believe that Mexican liberalism failed as a vehicle of nationalism because its adherents “instinctively” rejected the Mexican Catholic conservative protonationalism that was promised in the ideas of Mier and Carlos María Bustamante. Had intellectuals later added social content and a populist vision to this protonationalism, Mexico could have developed a counterpart to Russia’s Slavophiles (Romantic, nationalist conservatives—who read German). If Mexico had had Slavophiles, their antithesis to liberalism might have developed the same kind of radical indigenist agrarian socialism that, in the populist vision, “freed Russia from any necessity of passing through the stage of bourgeois capitalism” (p. 201). Brading concludes:

But the Russian analogy is not acceptable. To understand why, we must study the sources Brading read (Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism [New York, 1965]; Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution [New York, 1966]) in order to find that the missing link is one Alexander Herzen. What exactly was the synthesis Mexico missed? In Russia, the Slavophile thesis (romanticized myths of a Pan-Slav past and naturally noble peasants) and its liberal, pro-Western antithesis (ideals of Utopian Socialism and the need for rapid change) were reconciled in Herzen’s splendid synthesis: Mother Russia was the vessel chosen to transform decadent Europe’s ideals into practice because Russian peasants “naturally” and “unconsciously” practiced equality and socialism in their collective mirs. In what sense is this synthesis real and true? Martin Malia addressed the question directly. It is the answer to a question framed exclusively in terms of European political ideas. Herzen’s synthesis was part of a paper war. It was a Russian “reply to European arrogance,” and it served the needs of intellectuals to declare their historical equality with the West. It is in this sense that the analogy explains the Mexican failure: its liberalism failed to impress European intellectuals.

The point needs belaboring, I believe, because this analogy is intended to unite the three essays in the book. I can find no other factors in the Russian experience that apply to Mexico. Mier and Bustamante had no disciples; Herzen did, but they took to terrorism or disillusion in circles of the sort Dostoevsky described in The Possessed. Some fifty years after Mexico’s Reforma, Russia tried to create a class of small individual landowners by enabling mirs to dissolve their communal bonds. For the twentieth century there is no compelling evidence that mirs had any part in shaping the collectivist agrarian policies of the Soviet First Five-Year Plan. Since actual rural collectivization experience took place in both countries at about the same time, Mexico does not appear to have failed hopelessly. Finally, it seems quite clear that neither Russia with a Herzen nor Mexico without one was ever really “freed from the necessity of passing through the stage of bourgeois capitalism.” The notion that any country leaps from “the middle ages” to anything, much less to “agrarian communism,” is a marker of polemical rhetoric, not a summary of actual historical experience.

Brading himself knows better than this. Vague generalizations, he says, imply a “refusal to examine the forces at work in Mexican society” (p. 177). In his prizewinning book, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (Cambridge, 1971), he demonstrated how effectively archival research interpreted by careful social analyses can be. In my opinion that book contains the most brilliant description we have of how Mexican colonial elites contrived to undercut, co-opt, and maintain control of Spanish Bourbon efforts to reform them.

In this book, however, Brading does not fulfill his promise. He knows the right questions. How do ideas really work upon people? Who were the liberal elites, and how did they move men’s minds? Who were their followers, and what were their interests? He even begins to answer them with an intriguing hypothesis. He speculates that the “liberal constituency” was composed of Yorkino guerillas, rural caciques, state governors, urban textile workers, and big city léperos. Sensitive to the complex socioeconomic structure of rural Mexico, he suggests that liberalism was also supported by a broad rural middle group of mestizo mastercraftsmen, small property owners, and substantial tenant farmers, who were capable of mustering manpower and resources from families of squatters, day laborers, and sharecroppers to maintain the armies of Benito Juárez. He believes that liberal leaders can be located geographically in a “Liberal Crescent,” stretching from Guerrero through Michoacán, Jalisco, part of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí to Veracruz. However, because he read famous liberal authors instead of widely disseminated propaganda, and because no one has yet worked out the political and economic sociology of the liberals, he cannot identify the interests of either the local leaders or their followers. Instead, he reverts to another analogy: the followers are the “menu-peuple, the typical constituency of European radicalism,” who “instinctively” resent the rich (p. 219). Once again, analogy distracts the reader from proof, and the conclusion collapses to a hyperbole of failure: “The failure of classic liberalism to express popular aspirations retarded social reform for over half a century” (p. 150). How was it that, in spite of this “failure,” liberalism attracted such widespread and popular support in nineteenth-century Mexico? This is not, as Brading would have us believe, a mysterious paradox. The “mystery” is simply a failure to explain.