In this revision of her doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Paris in 1988, Annick Lempérière deals with a topic rarely addressed by Anglo-American (particularly U.S.) historians of Latin America: the role of the intellectual—that is, the writer-scholar-statesman—in society. Lempérière shows how that role changed in Mexico from the collapse of the Porfiriato in 1910 through the rise and maturation—and ultimate crisis—of the “institutional-revolutionary” state over the next 58 years. She focuses on the shifting relationship between intellectuals and government, as well as on the tie between the intellectuals and a growing urban-industrial society with expanding opportunities for higher education. Above all, she demonstrates how intellectuals evolved from ideologues of nationalism to spokesmen for freedom of thought and, finally, critics of the institutionalized revolution.
The author charts this change in 11 chapters that methodically analyze the cultural and intellectual trends accompanying key social and political developments after the chaotic military phase of the Revolution. Her first four chapters highlight the phenomenon of Mexican revolutionary nationalism that, beginning in the 1920s, rose to its apogee under the popular president Lázaro Cárdenas. Lempérière portrays nationalism as the remarkable cultural creation of a late Porfirian middle class that, in its revolt against positivism, embraced the ideals of indigenismo as the path to true national development. She stresses the role of José Vasconcelos and others of his generation, who implanted the nationalist vision through their influence in the Secretaria de Educatión during the “Sonoran” regimes. Her remaining chapters chart the gradual decline of nationalism as a cohesive, all-embracing ideology; its hardening into a dogma espoused by only a few; and its rejection by a new generation of intellectuals who, attuned to international currents and domestic social changes after 1940, viewed their country in more universalist terms.
Throughout these chapters, the author seeks primarily to show the increasingly autonomous status of intellectuals vis-à-vis the state, as well as their growing willingness to critique the policies of an authoritarian regime. She does this well by describing, in chapter 6, the growth of higher educational institutions that became havens for a new brand of intellectual, more specialized and free of the strictures of official (indigenist) ideology. She thereby reveals the origins of the country’s modern social science disciplines, with their critical approach to the reality of Mexico; pointing out, for example, the role of historian Daniel Cosío Villegas and his disciples at the Colegio de México, and that of sociologist Lucio Mendieta y Núñez at UNAM.
Lempérière also provides a careful assessment of the work of Octavio Paz, including a discourse analysis of his Labyrinth of Solitude (1950, 1962). For her, Paz’s literary career epitomizes the new situation of Mexican writers by the end of the 1950s, shaped by the expansion of an urban, educated market of readers and by the impact of new ideas and trends from abroad. Among other things, these factors allowed the writers to recover their older, nineteenth-century role as cultural mediators. The book’s last three chapters discuss the rise of leftism in intellectual circles after 1960 and the politicization of university life that preceded the tragic, Cardenist-inspired protest movement of 1968. Lempérière reassesses the significance of the latter, seeing it as a precursor of the civic movements that, since the 1970s, have sought to pluralize Mexican political life.
In sum, Lempérière’s work embodies not only an impressive piece of scholarship, based on a variety of primary sources of twentieth-century Mexican thought, but also (especially if and when it is translated for English readers) a valuable view of how Mexicans constructed nationalism, only to escape, finally, from its intellectual prison.
