For historians of modern Latin America who so often work with the idea of the nationstate, the exact nature of nationalism and how it developed is a constant, if at times implicit, concern. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo attempts to grapple with this issue by tying it to modernism and examining it through an analysis of Mexico’s attendance at world’s fairs between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1920s. In order to compare pre- and postrevolutionary events, the author focuses on the 1889 fair in Paris and those of 1922 in Rio de Janeiro and 1929 in Seville. Based on a wide array of sources, including “Exposiciones Internacionales” files in the Fomento records of Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación, the author studies how fields such as architecture, art, statistics, maps, patents, governance, natural history, and sanitation were portrayed in Mexico’s exhibitions.
Tenorio-Trillo’s view of how nationalism was formed, and therefore of what it consists, is elitist, international, and authoritarian. He argues that Mexico’s socioeconomic and political leadership, absent popular input, defined the nation in terms of its image compared to an internationally (read Western European and North American) determined ideal of modernism. Moreover, the ideal constantly changed over time, thus negating any opportunity to reach this chimerical absolute. He uses the metaphor of a series of interacting mirrors, reflecting incomplete and ephemeral images of modernism, to underline his point.
In the nineteenth century, the attainment of this elusive goal through the presentation of a modern façade to the world, Mexico hoped, would gain it prestige and economic benefit. The country’s exhibition builders, whom Tenorio-Trillo calls “The Wizards of Progress,” deftly presented a largely false image of Mexico as secure, sanitary, free, sovereign, liberal, republican, and democratic. By reinventing the past they even created a “Porfirian indigenism.” The fairs of the 1920s likewise aimed for economic gain and prestige, but they also added a political element. Revolutionary mobilization and, consequently, the need for internal cohesion prompted image-makers to claim that Mexico was national for the first time—a popular, mestizo, and Indian nation. In this process the revolution came to be equated with the nation and, by extension, the official party.
Mexico at the World’s Fairs is an engaging and provocative study that demonstrates very persuasively the hollowness, even seemingly the fragility, of nationalism. Indeed, as portrayed, nationalism is little more than a manufactured, manipulated, and superimposed vision measured against a constantly changing target. This leads to the question then of why nationalism has been such a potent force, one capable of stirring the masses and overcoming class, race, region, and other divisions. Tenorio-Trillo, by choice, does not venture into this arena of inquiry. By not doing so, however, his otherwise excellent study seems unanchored, lacking an explicative component that might connect it to the empirical.
