National Narratives in Mexico

Enrique Florescano, arguably the dean of living historians in Mexico and one of the most influential scholars of the twentieth century in the field of Mexican history, has written a wide-ranging, thoughtful, if ultimately rather quirky book about the historiography of the country by Mexicans, recognizably linked to several of his previous works on indigenous myth complexes and forms of collective memory. His central objects are “interpretations of history that in different periods have attempted to explain the Mexican past” (p. xi), not only among professional historians, but also custodians of the state and the common people. Beginning with accounts from the pre-Columbian period (including mythology, mural cycles, stele inscriptions, and codices that survived the conquest), the book moves successively through the colonial period, the era of nation building following independence from Spain, revolutionary nationalism of the post-1910 period, and the age of professionalization of history as a discipline in Mexico. Among the most laudable qualities of the book are its vast scope, the deep knowledge of its author, and the fact that it concentrates discussion of these five phases all in one place, providing along the way (occasionally to the distraction of the reader) potted histories of the colonial period, the Mexican Revolution, and Western historiography from Herodotus through Vico to the present. Of the book’s many virtues, not least are its many photographs and reproductions of codex images, engravings, maps, and so forth; its useful data (as in the table on p. 142 of the principal religious chroniclers of New Spain); and its extended and insightful discussions of the work of Florescano’s historiographical heroes, among them Lorenzo Boturini, Bernardino de Sahagún, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Vicente Riva Palacio, and José Vasconcelos. There are also some oddly extended but extremely valuable discussions of bodies of work or genres of historical representation, such as the land titles of colonial indigenous communities known as títulos primordiales (chapter 6), mostly spurious but nonetheless very revealing of forms of historical thinking and group identity.One of the great themes of the book is ethnic and cultural hybridization both in history and historiography, and Florescano is at great pains throughout to emphasize the mestizo nature of historical thought and writing after the advent of the Spanish, a program positively vasconcelista in tone. This betrays one of the work’s peculiarities, however, which is that the author seems more bent on illuminating Mexican history through historiography than historiography with reference to history. Such an approach turns out to be rather circular, since it assumes the reality of the very social, cultural, and political representations that it ought to problematize on its way to explaining why history has been written the way it has. Another of his major themes is the close relationship between the state and historical writing of all sorts, from the pre-Columbian period onward. Here he makes the cogent (if oft-observed) point that historical memory is coterminous with the agenda and agents of the state, which from the late Aztec éminence grise Tlacaelel to the constructors of the postindependence and post-Revolution historia de bronce have sought to shore up the ruling regime’s claims to legitimacy and inevitability. Florescano is masterful at depicting this process, as for example in his extended discussion of Vicente Riva Palacio’s great high Porfirian synthesis, México a través de los siglos. But this approach does lead to some problems, as with the implicit identification of the collective memory of common people with the versions of history on offer from literate elite codifiers of that history. Here even as accomplished a historian as Florescano is, like the rest of us, finally a prisoner of his sources, most especially since he relies almost entirely on printed and canonical texts. In the end he offers the reader a somewhat Whiggish triumphalism that assumes a “Mexico” not much in evidence as an “imagined community” until sometime in the twentieth century.In the latter sections of the book Florescano surveys with a decidedly critical eye recent trends in history writing on Mexico by Mexicans, concluding that the professionalization of the discipline — with its in-built and restless revisionism and its emphasis on the local, the transient, and the cultural instead of on national narratives — has produced a fragmented vision rather than the unified new historia patria he would apparently prefer to see. He suggests obliquely that Hayden White and other relativists poisoned the historiographical groundwater and thus the well of Mexican historiography itself. With this, in his view, has come a decline in the quality of professional history writing since about 1980, the disappearance of a “recognizable program . . . or precise goals” (p. 369), and the fatal rupture between academic historiography and collective memory. The problem is that he has never been able to demonstrate just where the locus of this popular collective memory has resided, if not in the state’s account of itself. Still, this is a thoughtful book by a highly accomplished historian that will provide not only information and plausible interpretations, but food for discussion among those interested not only in Mexico, but also the development of historical thinking more generally

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