Imagining and the Cultural History of Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Those participating in the crafting of the new cultural history of nineteenth-century Mexico are interested, above all, in “imagining” or, perhaps more accurately, in “imaginings.” That is, they seek to understand how the nation has been imagined, how subjectivity has been imagined and, in some of their most provocative work, how the imaginings and thus construction of nation and subjectivity have been (and are) implicated in each other. In this short article I will not measure current work on Mexican cultural history against an a priori definition of “new cultural history,” as set out by some of its better-known practitioners (including Lynn Hunt, Stuart Hall, and Roger Chartier), in order to point out what is supposedly missing and, therefore, needs to be done.¹ Rather, I prefer to examine the methods and theoretical approaches that those studying “imaginings” in nineteenth-century Mexico have found to be most useful, and to take stock of the insights that have been gained. Hopefully, in the process of discussing these works, some of the contours of the complex and multidisciplinary enterprise known as the “new cultural history” of Mexico will emerge.²

While Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community” remains the starting point for those interested in one of the dominant concerns of nineteenth-century Mexican historiography—the forging of the postcolonial nation—the elasticity of the term imagining has led to its use in unfamiliar settings, where it has been more footnoted than followed.³ Perhaps those Mexicanists who most closely adhere to Anderson’s understanding of the nation as an imagined community are the contributors to Imaginar la nación, a collection edited by François-Xavier Guerra and Mónica Quijada.⁴ In his introduction to this work, Guerra defines the nation as a new way to conceive human communities and as a new model of community in two senses of the term. In the first sense, the nation serves as an archetype or ideal, a point of reference for imagination, thought, and action that attempt, always unsuccessfully, to bring it into being. The nation is also a model in a second sense, as a hitherto unheard of combination of ideas, imaginaries (imaginarios), values and, thus, of behaviors. All of these concern the nature of society and the conceptualization of human collectivity, including its intimate structure, social links, relation to history, and duties. In the hands of the historians of nineteenth-century Mexico who contributed to Imaginar la nación, this broad definition of the imagining of the nation gives way to a more focused concern with the changing visions of the nation held by both rulers and ruled and the strategies used either to impose or resist these visions.

For example, in her chapter entitled “¿Nación moderna or república barroca? México, 1823-1857,” Annick Lempérière focuses on public ceremonies during the period between the fall of Emperor Iturbide and the promulgation of the Constitution of 1857. In doing this she offers a new interpretation of the Reform laws, one that stresses that cultural and symbolic factors were as important as political and economic ones (as they have been traditionally understood). The Reform laws—especially the Ley Lerdo, which mandated that corporations sell their property—have generally been interpreted as liberal measures designed to promote economic growth and create responsible and autonomous citizens by placing property in circulation and, thus, in the hands of private owners. Yet by insisting on the equal importance of the cultural and symbolic, Lampérière provides a concrete example of how cultural history can add to our understanding of the past. In her interpretation, such property holdings allowed corporations to fulfill their religious duties and obligations and to control and occupy public space. This, in turn, enabled them to mobilize and control important sectors of society. For Lampérière the most important aspect of the Ley Lerdo was that it created neutral spaces, ones liberated from religious connotations and identifications, at the disposition of state authorities, who could then utilize these spaces for the exclusive presentation of symbols and ceremonies that stressed national and republican identity. Lampérière draws on the insights of Mona Ozouf’s work on revolutionary France, especially her insistence on the state’s need for abstract and uniform neutral space to serve as staging grounds for equally abstract principles of the new regime, to chart a similar transition in Mexico.⁵ This transformation began with the sacralized and hierarchical space controlled by a horizontal network of corporations (including the clergy, cofradías, and ayuntamientos) characteristic of what she calls the baroque republic (Mexico between 1822 and 1857). It terminated with the conquest of space by new institutions, especially the juntas patrióticas, and by military strongmen, who promoted military parades. The culmination of this process was the civic conquest of space. Also significant, although not as fully developed, is Lampérière’s argument that the establishment of the juntas patrióticas, institutions independent of traditional corporations, led to the creation of a network of spaces and places of modern sociability—the press, cafes, bookstores, print shops, and small business outlets—peopled by tradesmen, artisans, and other supporters of the new liberal regime.⁶ Critical for my discussion is Lampérière’s focus not only on ceremony and ritual (a staple of the new cultural history), but also on the production of place, a topic of growing interest, and one to which I will return.

Whereas Lampérière and other contributors to Imaginar la nación adhere relatively closely to Anderson’s concept of the nation as an imagined community, in the most recent book-length study dedicated exclusively to “imagining” the Mexican nation, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s Mexico at the World’s Fair: Crafting a Modern Nation, “imagining” has become “imaging.” Tenorio-Trillo has chosen this word to underscore the importance of form, style, and facade not over content but as the content of nations, nationalism, and modernity. At the same time, “image” captures the role of elites in creating a vision of the modern Mexican nation through writing, architecture, painting, and science, just some of the artifacts of cultural production on display for foreign consumption at world’s fairs.⁷

Rather than chart the formation of an imagined community of readers and the nation through a study of print and the media in Mexico, as Anderson might have done, Tenorio-Trillo looks to Paris, to the construction of the Aztec pavilion at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889. It is here that he locates the fashioning (and, subsequently, the constant refashioning) of Mexico’s national image within a global, rather than a national, context. Borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt, he shows Mexican elites at the end of the nineteenth century engaged in a process of “autoethnography,” representing themselves at the fair in ways that engaged with dominant, European orientalist conceptions of Mexico.⁸ At the same time, by constantly trying to live up to and portray themselves in terms of what they considered to be European conceptions of modernity and nationalism, Mexican image-makers helped create these very understandings of Western nationalism, modernity, and progress, not only for Mexicans back home but for Europeans as well. It is this that Tenorio-Trillo has in mind when he states that all features of the Aztec pavilion—its design, as well as the machines, books, paintings, and displays that it housed—were presented by the “wizards of progress” as particularly Mexican versions of universal forms. They were at one and the same time uniquely Mexican and universal in style, domestic interpretations of universal principles. Only by acting for an outside audience— enacting their own exoticism, but in terms and forms recognizably European— could the wizards of progress assert for Mexico a place within the community of modern nations.

One of the most important of these European forms was science, and Tenorio-Trillo looks at how race, hygiene, medicine, sanitation, criminology, anthropology, statistics, and public administration were all implicated in the cultural construction of the national image. He also explores the writing of Mexico’s national history, indigenismo, and the graphic arts. These were forms of knowledge that described and mapped the nation in different ways; and all were represented within the confines of the Aztec palace. All, as well, are considered individually by Tenorio-Trillo—they were ingredients in the creation of the national image that do not yield a holistic model or ideal type of nationalism. Instead they sustain a multitude of voices within a conceptualization of nationalism and national image that is not neatly defined, but contradictory and always in the making. Rather than lead to a definitive conclusion, they are historical trails that converge at various points, ones that Tenorio-Trillo finds persistently present in the history of nationalism.

In the dialectic of autoethnography, the attitudes and perceptions of elite Mexicans concerning their own nationality were also transformed, as were those of more popular social groups. These latter, however, had to wait for their turn both to be part of and to shape the national image. During the Porfiriato and up to the 1920s, reshaping the national image and the nationalism associated with it was, at least according to Tenorio-Trillo, a matter for elites. In his words: “For the time being, the nation was solely for those who created it.”⁹ It was only after the revolution that this process came to include nonelites. Tenorio-Trillo’s agenda, then, is to look across time, to suggest that the creation of a national image in Mexico that dates from the late nineteenth century, conditioned to a large extent by a global, universal context, helps us understand what was distributed and consumed as “Mexican” later in the twentieth. He establishes that there may not be a clear “cause and effect” relationship between domestic developments and this imaged Mexican national identity. However, in Mexico at the World’s Fair the process of how the image may have been inculcated and then refashioned is not Tenorio-Trillo’s primary concern. Nor is the study of alternative national projects. Although he clearly acknowledges that such projects existed, he distinguishes them from the topic of his own interests.

Others, however, have focused on alternative national projects, and their work has been greatly enriched by the insights and methods associated with the history of gender, ethnicity, and subalternity. For example, the imagining of the nation was a highly gendered process. This is demonstrated by the work of Lisa Glowacki, who utilizes Anderson’s insight as to the importance of print capitalism, especially newspapers, in the formation of the imagined community of the nation to probe the relationship between print, nationalism, and gender. She accomplishes this by examining El Album de la Mujer, a periodical written by and for elite women in the 1880s.¹⁰ Those who wrote for this paper used the very same discourses that contemporaries employed to keep women in the home to stake a claim for women’s participation in the public space of the nation. El Album, envisioned by its publisher as a monument to women, served as a written monument to women’s claims to national space in the same way that public monuments of the Porfiriato created and memorialized the history and progress of the nation. Glowacki shows, then, how intertwined the discussion of women, nation, text, and public space can and should be.

Peasants have also imagined the nation, as Florencia Mallon, Peter Guardino, and others have shown.¹¹ In Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Mallon utilizes a comparative perspective, drawing her evidence from Cajamarca and Junín in Peru, and Morelos and Puebla in Mexico, to propose a new approach to nationalism and popular political culture that would explain the different trajectories of nation-state formation in Peru and Mexico. She begins by “problematizing” the concept of community, rejecting the idea of a seamless, undifferentiated rural society. Instead, she finds communities riven with gender, ethnic, generational, lineage, patronage, and economic divisions, with all relationships, at all levels, subject to negotiation and contestation. These struggles lead to what Mallon calls “communal hegemony and provide rural peoples with the cultural and political resources to participate in regional and national processes of state formation. In a sense, then, before alternative forms of the nation can be imagined, community itself must be imagined or constructed through local political, social, and cultural processes and struggles.

Like much of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Mexico, Mallon’s book is about agency—in this case, the agency of subaltern groups. Mallon is clear, however, that commitment to “excavating political history from below” does not mean a “simple celebration of subaltern agency” nor the “uncritical celebration of popular resistance.” Instead it involves a reconceptualization (“decentering,” in her terms) of the study of politics and a recognition of the complex identities of subalterns. But Mallon also acknowledges a different kind of agency, one that has become of increasing interest to some cultural historians. This is the agency of historians themselves and of those who interpret historical memory at the local level. And the bones of Xochiapulco are central to the understanding of both.

These bones, unearthed in the mid-1970s by municipal workers excavating in the central plaza of Xochiapulco, a village in the Sierra de Puebla, and subsequently displayed in the municipal building as the remains of Austrian soldiers killed during the French Intervention, periodically resurface in Mallon’s text. They serve as a metaphor for her own task of excavating submerged discourses of peasant nationalism that had been buried by the official version. More importantly, the story of these bones—Mallon’s research shows them to be of Mexicans, not Austrians—leads Mallon to consider the role of the local intellectual, both in the present and the past, in negotiating the terms under which those at the local level march in the official parade of the nation. The identification of the bones as Austrian by Donna Rivera Moreno, a local expert on the history of her community, becomes a way of engaging the official discourse and situating Xochiapulco within that story. Local interpretations of history, then, along with philharmonic orchestras, juntas patrióticas, funerals, and other rituals, serve as arenas of argumentation where power gets consolidated and contested, arenas in which the official tenets of nationalism can be inspected, accepted, refashioned, or rejected. It is here where Mallon’s work most closely parallels that of Guy Thomson and of many of the contributors to Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico.¹²

But the bones do something else—they enable Mallon to reflect on the power relationship that exists between herself and Donna Rivera Moreno and to consider more generally the relationship of historians to the subjects of their investigations. Thus the position from which Mallon writes is not that of the historian as innocent bystander, but from “inside the struggles over power and meaning.”¹³ Her historical research forms part of her own concern with simultaneously remaking the present. By including other voices and knowledges in her text, such as that of Rivera Moreno, and in the strategies that she uses to present evidence, with extensive quotations from local petitions and sources, she can also be seen to be attempting the kind of “dialogic reading” advocated by Dominick LaCapra in a recent article in the American Historical Review. As LaCapra states: “A combination of accurate reconstruction and dialogic exchange is necessary in that it accords an important place to the ‘voices’ and specific situations of others at the same time as it creates a place for our ‘voices’ in an attempt to come to terms with the past in a manner that has implications for the present and future.”¹⁴ As in some recent life histories, and in works like Richard Price’s Alabi’s World, in which the author uses four different fonts to represent four different points of view, readers are provided with enough voices to carry out a different reading than the one intended by the author and, thus, to draw their own conclusions.¹⁵

Mallon is also a contributor to Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, a volume edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent in which the conversation about the relationship between state formation and popular culture is continued.¹⁶ However, as this volume is premised upon engaging the contributions of James Scott as well as those of Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, many contributors place less emphasis on hegemony (although in his closing remarks William Roseberry does a good job of resituating the term) than on state formation as a process of cultural revolution by which means rulers moralize, normalize, and mold “subjectivities.” Central to the work of Corrigan and Sayer is the desire not to reify the state but to show that “the state” itself is a claim, “imagined” if you will, that works within us by seeking to create, although it is unable to wholly constitute, social identities.¹⁷ As most of the contributors to Everyday Forms of State Formation are concerned with the twentieth century, I leave a consideration of their works to others. One author who does focus primarily on the nineteenth century, Romana Falcon, uses Corrigan and Sayer’s insights to analyze how jefes políticos in Porfirian Coahuila identified people in terms of discrete categories—those of citizen, taxpayer, soldier, worker, and vagrant, among others—in an attempt to “prescribe ways of seeing the world and each person’s place in it.”¹⁸ I myself have also found Corrigan and Sayer’s work useful in my examination of the struggle to inculcate values and to create subordinate and suitably motivated workers, as well as peaceful and working citizens, in a mining district in Porfirian Chihuahua. At least there (and, no doubt, elsewhere in Mexico), manners and morality provided the material out of which rulers constructed the cultural framework, or “great arch,” through which they claimed the right to rule; at the same time manners and morals constituted the medium that workers and others could use to resist such claims. Such claims involved moralizing, normalizing, and transforming workers into individuals through the regulation of alcohol, prostitution, gambling, vagrancy, and public space.¹⁹

In Chihuahua and elsewhere, this process of moral reform and state formation was at the same time a gendered project, with the private sphere of the family, including strictly defined roles for men and women, seen as the antidote to public sites of vice.²⁰ Such an observation helps highlight the fact that no approach has contributed more to shaping our understanding of the imagining and constructing of subjectivities than those associated with the history of gender. As in the study of most other times and places, “gender” has been at the forefront of the new cultural history of Mexico. Although I intend to focus primarily on three recent monographs, I think that it is important to begin by setting out, albeit in a schematic fashion, the various influences that have shaped the many strands of gender history in nineteenth-century Mexico. While historians of women and historians of gender would, at times, reject being considered part of the same historical enterprise, the interest of social historians in recovering the voices of those previously considered to be inarticulate has led to the study of women and women’s roles and to the exploration of the question of gender. A recent example of these approaches is Women of the Mexican Countryside, a volume edited by Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan.²¹ Likewise, although family history and gender history are often more distinct than one might think, they are brought closer together by historians such as Asunción Lavrin and many of the contributors to her volume Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America in their explorations of issues such as marriage patterns, values like honor and shame, inheritance, legal codes, and Church doctrine on the family. These studies—often framed within a paradigm involving the creation of, and deviance from, norms—have powerfully influenced the agenda in gender history.²²

As Carmen Ramos Escandón indicates in her recent compilation Género e historia: la historiografía sobre la mujer, and as she illustrates through her own work, it has been through the writing of Joan Scott that gender, defined as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes and as a primary way of signifying relationships of power, has become a useful category of historical analysis in the study of Mexico.²³ This definition of gender has led researchers to probe the working of power in many places. It has led to the study of women as symbols or markers; of the discourses that cast women as, for example, prostitutes or guardian angels; of the rhetoric of domesticity; of how discourses “plotted women” within the narrative of the nation; and of prostitution, something of a boom field.²⁴ These studies have often been carried out within a framework that focuses on how the social construction of identity works as a means of social control and in the identification of self or class, sometimes by creating an “other.”

Such is the case in Rafael Sagredo’s recent book, María Villa (a) La Chiquita, no. 4002, in which he uses the circumstances surrounding the sensational 1897 murder of one prostitute by another to trace how the press, the judicial system, and criminologists transformed María Villa (the poor, racially mixed murderer) into the veritable definition of marginality, abnormality, and the “other.”²⁵ Drawing on a variety of primary sources, contemporary novels, and María Villa’s own writings, as well as much of the recent work cited in the previous paragraph, Sagredo takes us through Villa’s life—her humble origins in the countryside, her deception and seduction at the hands of a lover, her life in the brothels, and, after the murder of her rival, her life in Belén—to show how these episodes and events, indeed, her entire life, had been shaped by the ideologies dominant during the Porfiriato. One strength of Sagredo’s work is his fine eye for detail, as in his description of the funeral procession of the murdered prostitute, “La Malagueña,” or in the excerpts he has chosen from the love letters a fellow prisoner sent to Villa. Another is his ability to perceive themes of great interest to those currently engaged in cultural history—gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as their deployment in medical, criminological, and other dominant discourses—in the life of a single person, María Villa, who was characterized as an agent of social demoralization and discursively linked to sickness, alcohol, violence, disorder, and crime.²⁶ So powerful were these dominant social discourses, Sagredo contends, that María Villa herself seemed to be their captive, accepting them in her own writings from prison so fully that she asserted her own “normality” in accordance with the norms that these discourses championed. Sagredo leaves little room for an alternative reading of her life, for oppositional discourses, or for the ability of prostitutes to shape the terms of discourse.

In his most recent book, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico, Steve Stern also draws from divergent approaches to the history of gender.²⁷ To begin with, he is interested in agency, that is, in portraying peasant and plebeian women as historical agents who actively negotiated and battled over the terms of what he refers to as a “contested patriarchal pact” in late colonial Morelos, Oaxaca, and Mexico City.²⁸ In short, women developed strategies and drew from cultural resources and everyday experience to argue for a conditional definition of male gender rights, whereas males (and it is notable that subaltern masculinity is also treated as a cultural construct) advocated a more absolute interpretation of these rights. Stem concludes that in prefeminist or nonfeminist settings, the events and processes he describes constituted agency (of a kind). Thus even “if they [wives, amasias, and daughters] did not challenge patriarchal first principles of male dominance and female subordination as such, they nonetheless surrounded them with pressure.”²⁹

In this and other aspects of his analysis, Stem is heavily indebted to family history, especially to the work of David Warren Sabean. At heart, Stern’s book needs to be read as a creative engagement with many of the concepts set out by Sabean in Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870, where Sabean seeks to replace a reified notion of culture with “socially specific, exacting accounts of power, resistance, and constraints in loci, where many voices contend each for its own view of reality.”³⁰ In particular, Sabean is interested in the ways in which property and production (class, for short) in a particular locality shaped and were shaped by the family. As part of his analysis, Sabean considers how people in Neckarhausen conceptualized relations between husbands and wives, as evident in their use of the terms hausen and familie. In their discourse, women described a haushalter as a person whose duties and obligations came before their rights and power, a terminology that emphasized the exchange elements of marriage. For both men and women, talking about the house was an activity, “an argument, an expression of value, a claim, an acceptance of obligation.” Thus Sabean concludes that “whatever else the house was, it was always the product of continued negotiations between two parties. Inside the house each spouse viewed the other in terms of contending interests and conflicting loyalties and situated the other inside a configuration of character traits, blood lines, and moral force.”³¹

For his part, Stern makes the definition of “culture as argument” central to his work. However, rather than focus on class and family, as Sabean does, he substitutes gender. Likewise, instead of the house, he shows how men and women in late colonial Mexico argued about the meaning of patriarchy and the gender rights, obligations, and honor it entailed. Like “house” for Sabean, for Stern “patriarchy” was a negotiation between two parties where, in place of character traits, each side drew on the supposed gendered traits of women and men to make their claims more convincing. Stern, then, shows how patriarchy and gender rights mediated an entire system of values within a family and community context.

Finally, Stem sees gender as central to questions of power, with an echo occurring between “gendered understandings and organization of authority at the household and community levels of society and popular understandings and experiences of legitimate and illegitimate authority in general.”³² In an argument similar to one articulated by Richard Boyer, Stern also partly sees a metaphorical role for gender; that is, gender relations provide a model or metaphor for more encompassing relations of power.³³ Whereas Boyer sees this as a top-down process, as in his characterization of the “politics of marriage,” Stern sees causation in the other direction, as relations defined in the family and community are used to question more general issues of power. In addition, Stern finds that through this process of contesting patriarchal pacts and insisting on contingent definitions, women helped shape patriarchal rule at both levels.

In common with Stern, Ana María Alonso stresses women’s ability to negotiate gender and domesticity in order to question the absoluteness of their husbands’ claims to gender rights. Instead, women advocate reciprocity and fair treatment in their relationships. And, although she does note the similarity between the idioms used to denounce caciquismo in both the domestic and public realms, she conceptualizes the relationship between power and gender in a fundamentally different way from that of Stern. In Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, Alonso blends the insights of Michel Foucault with those of many others, especially Stuart Hall.³⁴ The result is provocative. From Foucault, she asserts the need for an “ascending analysis of power”—starting from its most minute mechanisms, each having their own history, techniques, and tactics—to see how these mechanisms of power are invested, colonized, utilized, and extended. In this micropolitics of power relations, there is a close relationship between discourses (defined as systems of knowledge that codify techniques and practices for the exercise of social control) and specific contexts, such as the prison, the asylum, the hospital, the university, and the school. As David Harvey concludes in his discussion of Foucault, these are dispersed sites, where a piecemeal organization of power is built up independently of any systematic strategy of class domination. No overarching general theory, then, explains what happens at each site; the one thing that they all have in common, however, is the human body—the site at which all forms of repression are ultimately registered.³⁵

To Foucault’s emphasis on bodies, Alonso adds “selves.” To a great extent, indeed, her book is about the imagining of subjectivity, with ethnicity and gender as central to the formation of subjects. To explore the self, Alonso focuses on the “effects of power” rather than on power itself. As she states: “In order to understand resistance, we cannot simply focus on institutional politics but must also pay attention to the politics of everyday life, to the way in which power is experienced and negotiated outside formal contexts, to the effects of power on identities and bodies.”³⁶ This makes power into a historical actor in its own right, in a way that makes many historians nervous. Again, quoting from Alonso: “Power inserts itself into bodies and selves and finds its alibi in the very ‘natures’ it configures.”³⁷ For her, then, the “subaltern domain is a site for the inscription and contestation of effects of power in identities.”³⁸ To carry out her analysis, Alonso has incorporated into her “ascending analysis of power” Smart Hall’s critique of Foucault, in which he attempts to bring back in a consideration of the “state system” and “state idea.” For Hall, and thus for Alonso, power is “multidimensional, a reciprocal interplay between centers of authority and quotidian practices.”³⁹

We have returned, then, to the interests of many contributors to the Joseph and Nugent reader: the dialectic between state forms and everyday life. As Alonso shows, in Namiquipa the state promoted a construction of gender and ethnic honor in a frontier context in which, up to the latter part of the nineteenth century, peasants were needed as warriors, part-time specialists in fighting the Apache. By the late nineteenth century, however, once they were no longer required to fight, the construction of honor, gender (both masculinity and femininity), ethnicity, warfare, and production that had previously been promoted by the state served as a basis for resistance to capitalist development and political centralization, circumstances that had prompted the state to attempt to inculcate new forms of subjectivities and identities. In Alonso’s approach, gender and ethnicity are related to power as metaphors: gender roles and family authority serve as a means to judge not only political and other authorities, but also the relations between rich and poor, the powerful and powerless, and the civilized and savage. But gender and ethnicity have additional impact in that they are interpenetrated in the creation of subjectivity. Thus, the construction or imagining of subjects was accomplished by means of a “military investment of bodies and identities” through which masculine virtue and prestige, ethnic identity, and the ability to work land became contingent on performance in warfare.⁴⁰ To lose land, then, as happened after the 1880s, meant also to lose honor, to have one’s masculinity questioned, to be cast as barbarian rather than civilized, to be transformed from “white” to ethnically “Indian.” It is in this sense that the meaning of interpenetration is to be understood. While it is impossible to do justice to the nuances of Alonso’s argument here, my hope is that sufficient material has been presented to persuade the reader that her work offers yet another way of imagining subjects and of conceptualizing the relationship between ethnicity, gender, and power.

In “The Masters of the Streets: Bodies, Power, and Modernity in Mexico, 1867-1930,” Cristina Rivera-Garza also identifies the body as a site for the inscription of power and power relations and, thus, as simultaneously a site of counterattack or contestation.⁴¹ Rivera-Garza focuses on public health and welfare institutions that dealt with prostitutes and the insane in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Mexico. She set out to write a history “through the body,” that is, one in which the body is at the center of processes of state formation. At times her approach corresponds to (and draws on) many of the works that analyze discourses of gender, health, and morality already discussed. This is especially true when she looks at the role of criminologists, psychiatrists, and other doctors who elaborated and legitimized discourses about the body in attempts to regulate behaviors, social relations, and public space in Mexico. Thus, doctors at the Hospital Morelos, where the medical branch of the sanitary police sequestered prostitutes suffering from venereal disease, and psychiatrists at La Castañeda insane asylum, the inauguration of which was a high point of Porfirian centennial celebrations in 1910, contributed to the growing medicalization of the body in late-nineteenth-century Mexico, the former by enunciating a discourse of the diseased and dangerous syphilitic body of the prostitute and the latter by articulating a similar discourse of the insane body. Both discourses encompassed the moral, class, and gender concerns of the time. They provided increasingly important means of talking about gender, class, nation, and modernity in at least two ways: first, by providing a stark contrast to “proper” or desired behaviors or roles and, second, through a kind of “transcoding” (a term not used by Rivera-Garza) that took place between the body of the prostitute or the insane, the family home, the space of the city, and the nation itself.⁴²

Yet it is when Rivera-Garza goes beyond the social control model that her work becomes most interesting. In common with so much of the work I have already discussed, she places the voices of those most affected, in her case prostitutes and the insane, at the forefront of her analysis to show how they fully participated not simply in the rejection or refashioning, but in the very creation of medicalized discourses within the hospital and insane asylum. Thus, Rivera-Garza conceptualizes resistance as part of the construction of the framework through which rule takes place, not as simply occurring after the fact. It is in this sense that she means that bodies are contested spaces. As in Tenorio-Trillo’s work, different, even contradictory, stories collide and converge in Rivera-Garza’s text in montage form, in which she focuses on exposing “moments of danger” rather than offering to tell things “how they really were.” This approach serves a number of contemporary political purposes— not only do formerly marginalized groups become historical agents in their own right, but the very fragility of dominant discourses are exposed, revealing, in the words of Rivera-Garza, lines of “weakness, interruptions, mobilities, and breakdowns as constitutive elements of the process of state formation.”⁴³ Her argument, then, is a subtle critique of some “social constructionist” perspectives in which discourses are reified rather than treated as process. For her the most important question becomes, as Taussig states it: “If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable?”⁴⁴

Final Considerations

A number of general conclusions can be teased from this brief treatment of “imagining” as the term has been used by some of those currently writing the cultural history of nineteenth-century Mexico. The first is the existence of a growing interest in the discursive construction of space and in space generally. We have seen, for example, Lampérière’s work on spaces and places of “modern sociability”; Alonso’s concern with the frontier as a liminal zone and with the regulation of frontier subjects’ location in and movement across this space; the interest of many of the contributors to Rituals of Rule with celebration, monument, and the moral geography of vice of the city; and Rivera-Garza’s interest in how the space of the city and nation became medicalized and, along with the body of the prostitute, an object of the physician’s gaze. Although not discussed above, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s article on the 1910 centennial celebrations, which were intended to be the “climax of an era,” must be included in any discussion of space.⁴⁵ In this article, Tenorio-Trillo takes the reader on two walking tours of the Mexico City of 1910, the first to look at the ideal city of Porfirian elites and the second to show how the ideal city acquired spatial and graphic expression in 1910, through monuments and, especially, through the great Desfile histórico, a public lesson in the official view of the nation’s past, present, and future. Underpinning Tenorio-Trillo’s concern with space is his interest in progress and, especially, modernity, a difficult term to define that often includes the aesthetic, philosophical, and artistic expressions associated with life at the end of the nineteenth century, at least in the case of Mexico, and the promise of the end of history through a belief in progress. Likewise, in his work on space and modernity, Glen David Kuecker concerns himself with how Mexicans located themselves within the changes that swept late-nineteenth-century Mexico, changes that he describes as a “perpetual maelstrom” and that included the very compression of time and space.⁴⁶ Kuecker’s work reveals the influence of geographers probing modernity and postmodernity for those interested in questions of space.⁴⁷

A second conclusion is that the conceptualization of culture as a relatively coherent system of norms and values that guide all kinds of conduct in society has been rejected. In its place we now see an emphasis on more discrete and conflicted cultures. This is apparent in Mallon’s emphasis on communities riven with divisions and on all relationships as being subject to negotiation (although, perhaps, her term “communal hegemony” brings back in the former definition of culture), and in Stern’s characterization of culture as argument. Likewise, a reified notion of the state is giving way to the idea of the state as itself imagined, as a process of cultural revolution that works from within us. Rethinking both culture and the state (often together), forms part of a larger questioning of holistic approaches or paradigms—seen in Tenorio-Trillo’s rejection of a holistic model of nationalism and in Rivera-Garza’s montage of contradictory stories—that see history as having overall coherence, direction, and meaning that can be captured within some metanarrative. As can be seen in the works of many of the authors considered here, this has led to a focus on the local, on exacting accounts of power and resistance where many voices contend.

This leads to the third conclusion, that dealing with the question of agency. When I began preparing this paper, I spoke to a historian of culture who defined the new cultural history as a history of the agency of individuals and groups, of looking at how individuals came up with scripts for their lives and tried to shape their lives. In a sense, then, cultural history was seen as the continuation of the agenda of much of social history, of giving voice to those previously considered to be inarticulate. And, indeed, much of the work considered in this article does pay close attention to such voices. At the same time, however, we have also seen that individuals themselves have been imagined and that, as much as agency, what is at stake is identity, subjectivity, and cultural understandings of the body. If power effects are inscribed on the body itself, for example, how is agency to be conceptualized?

The fourth conclusion, related to the third, is the question of the agency of historians and the ways in which they are implicated in the text. While Mallon attempts to situate herself within issues of power and meaning, Alonso wrestles to decide what narrative strategies she should employ to communicate her own critical positioning vis-à-vis the visions of Namiquipans (she decides on irony and paradox in place of totalizing monologue).

Fifth, and also related to the question of agency, is the emergence of distinct conceptualizations of power amongst many cultural historians of nineteenth-century Mexico. Here, Foucault’s influence has been felt in a number of ways, not least of all in the subjects chosen as the objects of study. As we have seen, Rivera-Garza depends on Foucault’s conceptualization of the body as a locus of contested power, while others, especially Pablo Piccato and Robert Buffington, focus on various discourses, including those of crime, hygiene, and alcohol.⁴⁸

In short, in this brief look at how the nation, the community, the state, subjectivity, and the body, among other things, have been imagined, it is apparent that those practicing the new cultural history of Mexico have been experiencing the same profound questioning of their enterprise as have those in other disciplines. I look forward to the discussions that this questioning generates.