This volume contains three essays, delivered by Brading at Cambridge University between 1974 and 1984, and four shorter “Interludes” separating the essays and “framed,” according to the author, “either as reviews or as preliminary drafts for a much larger work on the Mexican political tradition” (p. 1).
The first essay is entitled “St. Augustine and America: Hernán Cortés, the Franciscan Millennium and Bartolomé de las Casas.” It is followed by two interludes: “Guadalupe and Quetzalcóatl” and “The Mexican Churrigueresque and Neo-Classicism.” The second essay, “Classical Republicanism and Creole Patriotism: Simón Bolívar and the Spanish American Revolution,” is also followed by two interludes: “Bandit Mexico” and “The Cristiada and the Revolution.” The third essay bears the title “Social Darwinism and Romantic Idealism: Andrés Molina Enríquez and José Vasconcelos in the Mexican Revolution.”
If read as a “book,” which it claims to be, this work is devilishly hard going. At first, neither its title nor those of its essays and interludes convey a clear idea of its contents. Nor is a central unifying theme immediately apparent in the texts. A more careful reading, however, reveals a clear unity based on the ideas advanced in Brading’s earlier Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano: Mexican nationalism drew occasionally and eclectically on foreign ideas for inspiration, but it had primarily indigenous roots and was much more original than nationalism in the other Latin American nations. The first phase of its development was the work of the eighteenth-century creole clergy who sought to create a Mexican identity by glorifying the preconquest Indian past, purging idolatry from it through identifying Quetzalcóatl with the Apostle St. Thomas, and propagating the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. During the insurgency, creole intellectuals melded these ideas into a revolutionary ideology. A second and ideologically different phase was the creation of the Mexican national state by a relatively small group of anticlerical mestizo intellectuals and soldier-politicians during the Reforma and early Porfiriato. However, a clear continuity exists between the two. The cynical revolutionary establishment of modern Mexico has not been able to stamp out the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and found it convenient to exploit the glories of the nation’s preconquest past.
Despite the structural weaknesses inherent in its format, this is an admirable little volume. It reveals Brading’s intimate familiarity with the literary sources, an empathetic perception of their contents, and insights which add up to an original contribution to the history of Mexican political culture. Furthermore, while it draws heavily on ideology, it is nonideological. It marks the penultimate step in Brading’s transition from an economic and social historian to a historian of ideas. I hope that his major work will not be too long in gestation.
