Enrique Florescano (1937-2023)

Distinguished historian Enrique Florescano Mayet died on March 6, 2023, in the house that he and Alejandra Moreno Toscano—no less distinguished a historian—built and lived in in Cuajimalpa, Mexico City, on the old Carretera México-Toluca. The dwelling housed his impressive library and was a mandatory rendezvous for various generations of historians. For decades, trips to Cuajimalpa were a matter of legend among us historians. On March 6 I last visited the house; gone was the library, Florescano's friends were performing Indigenous death rituals, and we all were there, with Alejandra, seeing him off, that great friend, that man who, paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges, “tantos hombres había sido.”Since his return to Mexico from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in the early 1970s, Florescano became for decades a gravitational force in Mexican historiography. He was a prolific historian who moved freely, with precision, erudition, and ingenuity, from pre-Hispanic times to the present, from economic to cultural histories; he sought zoom-ins in order to conceive great panoramas that, in turn, resulted from, and advanced, insightful guiding ideas. His imprint is noticeable in sundry topics and eras of Mexican history, as much in pre-Hispanic history—Tiempo, espacio y memoria histórica entre los mayas (1992), El mito de Quetzalcóatl (1993), Los orígenes del poder en Mesoamérica (2009)—as in colonial economic and social history—Precios del maíz y crisis agrícolas en México (1708–1810) (1969), Estructuras y problemas agrarios de México (1500–1821) (1971). He contributed significantly to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of Mexico, learning from everybody, launching new ideas and criticism in academic and nonacademic articles, and constantly summoning, as it were, his growing conclave of students, intellectuals, and young and established scholars to ruminate together on the past and the present. He will be especially remembered for his pioneering work on the longue durée of memory and history in Mexico—Memoria mexicana: Ensayo sobre la reconstrucción del pasado; Época prehispánica–1821 (1987), Étnia, estado y nación: Ensayo sobre las identidades colectivas en México (1997)—as well as for his deep immersion in history writing as a discipline, a force for social change, and a vocation—La historia y el historiador (1997), Para qué estudiar y enseñar la historia (2000). For Florescano was a historian preocupado about the past and yet politically and intellectually ocupado with present concerns. He will be greatly missed. To friends and colleagues, the pain of his departure is partially relieved by the endurance of his vast and important work, and also by our conviction that, to the very end, he lived and died à la Florescano.His obra is too vast to be easily summarized. Now that he is gone, his trajectory seems mappable, but his concerns were always changing according to the vicissitudes of his life, of those of Mexico and the world, and according to new findings and approaches. To be sure, the input of his French professors explained his devotion to economic and social history. As Jean Meyer tellingly wrote when commenting on the French trajectory of his friend Enrique: Enrique Florescano llegó a París a una École en todo su resplandor, justo en la gloria de su reciente victoria. Le tocó leer a Marc Bloch y al Lucien Febvre de Combats pour l'histoire; tuvo la oportunidad de conocer al gran ogro de la leyenda, el gran “mandarín,” el “supercacique,” el tlatoani de la nouvelle histoire, Fernand Braudel, quien prolongaba su seminario en el Balzar con sus discípulos y estudiantes favoritos. . . . . . . [Pero] a la hora de su tesis se inspiró más bien en las obras de Ernest Labrousse, en particular de Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (1932) y la La crise de l’économie française à la fin de l'Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution (1943). De ahí el interés de Enrique Florescano por lo que más adelante se llamó “la historia cuantitativa” o histoire sérielle (Pierre Chaunu), por los precios del maíz, todo lo relacionado con la gran crisis política de 1810, la insurgencia de Hidalgo, etcétera. No se trata de despreciar lo político, como lo hizo Braudel un tiempo, sino de cruzar lo económico, lo social y lo político. Para Labrousse y Florescano esos tres elementos son inseparables y sus crisis respectivas, al entrelazarse, forman la mezcla explosiva que alimenta las revoluciones (1789, 1810, 1830, 1848, 1910).1Florescano's first research thus already embodied an encounter of local and cosmopolitan trends that, in turn, inspired new research in, and new syntheses of, Mexican history. He launched and sponsored important quantitative data gathering and analysis, as he had done with his pioneering work on the prices of maize in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Meanwhile, he was already exploring the pre-Hispanic past in early articles, gradually entering into an enriching dialogue with US historians and archaeologists. For he was, above all, an avid reader without specialization.In a way, Florescano embodied, in a single historian, the various roles distributed among different personalities in the history of history in Mexico. Starting with Memoria mexicana, he became one of Mexico's great historiographers and philosophers of history—together with the late Álvaro Matute and Edmundo O'Gorman. But Florescano also had something of Daniel Cosío Villegas, the institution builder, book publisher, and leader of large historiographical projects. Florescano built research groups and directed institutions (including the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia), edited book collections for the Fondo de Cultura Económica, and especially worked to connect scholars and ideas. Whereas Luis González was a Johan Huizinga–like historian whose vast erudition serviced microhistories, Florescano echoed Braudel in his breadth and capacity for synopsis.He once told me the story of how after the personal stress produced by a tragic robbery in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia in 1985, while he was its director, he stepped back and restarted. He refined his English and began to read and write, but no longer social or economic history; he began to function not only as a cultural entrepreneur and civil servant but as a conscious Mexican memory. His long friendship with Linda Schele was vital in this shift. I recall his frequent visits to the University of Texas at Austin to attend Schele's famous Maya meetings. As historian and nahuatlato Pablo Escalante recently recalled, “Florescano hizo algo que quizá no estaba del todo bien visto, y que a otros colegas les costaría trabajo todavía, esto es, reconocer el mérito de las investigaciones sobre México que se realizaban fuera de nuestro país, especialmente en Estados Unidos.”2 Hence, he retraced his footsteps, and thus ours, examining Mexico's historical consciousness as something that historians have owned but that also has owned us. Like very few, then, Florescano personified a continuous restart, from economic historian to philosopher of history, from synthesizer of great trends to crafter of minute analyses (the Mexican national flag, Quetzalcoatl, the notion of patrimony), from academic entrepreneur to teacher, always up to date in various languages . . . And he was extremely generous with his time and knowledge. We, his debtors in many senses, are many and from various generations. We all learned some of Florescano's lesson, we all benefited from Florescano's ayuda. For decades, there was no other historiographical magnet as alive, as openhanded and openminded, in our discipline, and in Mexico's cultural life, as Enrique Florescano.As the mastermind of the history and social science section of the important book collection SepSetentas, published by the Secretaría de Educación in the 1970s, Florescano opened new perspectives to us university students in 1970s and 1980s Mexico. The collection marked the career of many Mexican historians, exposing us to the then-innovative approaches to Mexican history: David Brading on the origins of Mexican nationalism, Friedrich Katz's early work on pre-Hispanic topics, John Coatsworth on the nuances of Porfirian economic growth, Richard M. Morse on cities, David J. Weber's early work on the northern frontier of New Spain, and Woodrow Borah on the economic and demographic collapse of New Spain. Florescano also coordinated various volumes, putting together variegated historians around the sundry topics he was exploring: land tenure, labor history, epidemics, bibliographies. But he also sought a broader and well-informed public discussion, and in 1978 he was one of the founders of Nexos, the publication that for the last 50 years has endured as one of Mexico's main discussion forums of cultural, political, historical, and economic issues.I am convinced that his obsession with Mexican memory and history derived from his own sense of being a participant in, and a builder of, both the memory and the history of his country. His great first panorama of memory/history was Memoria mexicana (translated in 1994 as Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence). This is an unsurmountable synthesis and a unique history of how the past and power have been thought in Mexico, from Mexica tlacuiloque to Lucas Alamán, from Vicente Riva Palacio to Andrés Molina Enríquez. The book does not assume a national teleology but instead examines the many luchas por el pasado, advancing here and there great provocative ideas that have served to think new research and approaches. One of those ideas, in Pablo Escalante's view, was Florescano's proposal about “la disolución . . . de la memoria étnica y su sustitución por la memoria local. El predominio de lo local sobre lo étnico es uno de los rasgos decisivos de la cultura indígena colonial, al menos desde mediados del siglo XVII. Y es decisivo, entre otras cosas, porque da un nuevo significado a la identidad indígena hasta la actualidad.”3 Moreover, his take on the rapid and massive destruction of Teotihuacan has ignited vivid discussions. For him, cosmogony, power, and expansionism were consubstantial.In sum, in the last half century, Florescano was perhaps the most important historiographical broker. As professor at El Colegio de México, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and as a cultural leader, he educated, promoted, and connected all, regardless of seniority and approaches. He received many honors throughout his careers—member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and winner of the Ordre National du Mérite (in 1985) and the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes (in 1996)—but his real prize was the respect, friendship, and collaboration of his many students and colleagues. His birthday celebrations, at his house, brought together not the official but the natural academy of history of Mexico. Sadly, his legendary table at the poblano-cuisine restaurant Casa Merlos in Tacubaya will receive him and his guests no more. His constant concern with the present situation of Mexico, seen through his historical erudition, will not be heard again. He was always clear about Mexico's problem. He wrote this in 2009, ruminating on the forthcoming celebration in 2010 of the bicentennial of Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution: Unánimemente, los autores que tratan el presente y las perspectivas de futuro consideran la pobreza en que viven más de 50 millones de mexicanos el tema más lacerante y culposo de nuestro tiempo. Una culpa histórica, pues hunde sus raíces en el pasado prehispánico y se prolonga y crece en los tres siglos de virreinato y los últimos 200 de existencia republicana. Un legado que, una vez más, corre el riesgo de ser transferido a las próximas generaciones si en lugar de arrojar culpas al vecino, al rival político al enemigo ideológico en turno, no llegamos a un acuerdo nacional de todas las fuerzas para trabajar unidas en su erradicación. No puede olvidarse que en los siglos transcurridos esas mayorías explotadas y miserables participaron decisivamente en la construcción de lo que hoy llamamos patria, nación o Estado nacional.4Adiós maestro, ¡qué solo parece este oficio sin Usted

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