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2005
CHAPTER NINE
DEATH
AND
THE
BIOGRAPHY
OF THE NATION
AND
THE MEXICAN
REVOLUTION
The mood of national reconciliation in peace, work, and science rested on a pantheon of heroes that included mortal enemies
and reconciled them under the national banner. Diaz incorporated onetime rivals such as juarez, Lerdo, and erstwhile supporters of Maximilian. Maximilian himself was not included, because
he was a foreigner, but Juarez did set aside funds for the widow of
his indigenous general Tomas Mejia, and Maximilian's story itself
was romanticized soon enough.
As state control of the dead and of national history was consolidated, however, the role of the dead in the opposition press
grew. It is, indeed, in this period of increasing stability that journals such as El hijo del Ahuizote began to make a regular habit of
printing calaveras to pass judgment on the firmament of public
fignres and on the regime itself:
The entire republic is a giap.t cemetery, and there are thousands of
niches here that justify our opinion.
First. The grave of dignity. Rest in Peace! ...
Honesty! May the earth fall upon you lightly.... You died suddenly, and in your place they have built a monument: this is a time of
hypocrisy.
Morality! You lie here.
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D. PonFU.Do P:ERPBTuo.
Fn8 un ferocM Sacarre4l
quo roin6 on aiglo cabal
metii!'> en nn ehiqnihuite;
Mnri6, y P?r l1ien 6 por mat
No hny qnten el cetro le quite,
EL SUJI:GRO D:a:
D.
PxRPSTIJO.
Sir~i6
y . __
EL CO)l:ZRCIAN'tB xN xllrai:suNoa.
De Rerlfn y de LondOn
cont,"at6 pan gr.1nd~ al credlto,
y ruuri6 do un i.trRCOn
de fiambrc, a) pagar E-1 rMito.
Figure 9.1. Top row of a calavera sheet, led by Don Porfirio and his father-in-law, Manuel Romero Rubio, in
1 hijo del Ahuizote, November 2, 1890 (courtesy of Hemeroteca Nacional).
Sheets and sheets of satiric calavera epitaphs were the counterpart of the official death cult. They denounced the corruption of
the regime and its politicians and the misappropriation of heroes
past, particularly Juarez, who had been placed at the core of the
new state cult: "Let's dry the tear that runs down our cheek at
the memory of this patriot, gather our emotions, and with a loud
voice curse the tyrants once again!" 5 A host of specters haunted
the Porfirian state; there was a latent sense that the official death
cult was a shell 'game and that the souls meant to sleep under the
bronze and marble were lurking somewhere else, and perhaps
demanding their due.
Porfirian progress in particular was haunted by the dead,
despite the government's ecumenical effort to'unite all factions
in death, to nationalize the dead. Porfirian industry, peace, and
progress brought mechanized killings to Mexico: railroad accidents, mass deportations to labor camps, ethnocidal campaigns in
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i
with the dead or, one might say, in the strong pull of the dead on
the living, a pull that was more intense than in any previous
period. Jose Guadalupe Posada is the artist who tracked this sensation with the greatest creativity.
Posada's Gran pante6n de calaveras is a striking depiction of
death in times of progress .(figure 9.2). In some respects, the
engraving appears to reproduce the old vanitas theme that was
perhaps most obsessively enunciated in the sixteenth-century
Capuchin Chapel of the Bone in Evora, Portugal, a church that is
decorated with human bones from floor to ceiling. Indeed, it is
the bones themselves that greet the visitor: "Nos ossos que aqui
estamos. Pelos vossos esperamos (We, the bones who are here, are
'
the community no longer stops for the dead, but goes about its
business, riding on the engine of progress and destruction.
The national government did its best to control and bring together the remains of the dead, and thereby lay claim to an objectivity and impartiality, to the transcendental serenity of the immortal nation. In 1900, the pro-government paper El imparcial put
this forward with-clarity, precision, and a dose of triumphalism:
"Now that hatred has been extinguished and consciences have
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quieted down, now that the heat has ceded its place to impassivity, and proof, data, and documentation have replaced eloquence
and rhetoric, now that there is a new method for this form of
knowledge, now is the time to reconstruct the nation's history."7
However, in the very act of scienti(ic dissection, historical reconstruction, and monumentalization, the state displayed its vain
obsolescence.
Time ran on aimlessly toward death, and it was in a hurry.
haunted. Displaced ways of life, the wrenching movement of capitalist expansion, modern statecraft,-ahd the mechanization of
death all brought the dead back as witnesses, ghosts, and omens.
Rumors of the end of the world haunted the era of progress.
Figure 9.3. Jose Guadalupe Posada, Choque de un eltktrico con un carro fUnebre.
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Revolutionary Violence
They say that about a million people died in the Mexican Revolution. Some died of hunger, others of sickness. Some died in battles
between modern and well-equipped armies, others were killed in
raids or hung as suspects. Sometimes foreigners were targeted,
their properties pillaged and their integrity violated. Other times,
villagers rose up in arms and killed in acts of popular justice.
None of these forms of violence was entirely new to Mexico.
The principal novelty was the deployment of efficient mechanized killing, with its infrastructure of machine guns, modern
artillery, and troop transportation by rail. Indeed, episodes such as
the Battle of Celaya (1915), where General Alvaro Obregon defeated General Pancho Villa, were in some ways Mexico's equivalent of the great Civil War battles in the United States; they were
Mexico's most brutal confrontation with industry in the service
of death.
Other forms of killing had an older genealogy. The hanging
of peasants and ragtag revolutionaries had already been used in
earlier campaigns: in the punitive expeditions against the Totonacs of Papantla, the Maya of Yucatan, and the Yaquis of Sonora,
for example. 9 Another staple of revolutionary violence, the firing
squad, had been deployed to great effect at independence, and
much more recently in the wars of the Reforma and during the
French invasion. Great figures had faced the firing squad, including the liberal Melchor Ocampo and the conservatives Miram6n
and Mejia, not to mention Maximilian of Hapsburg himself.
Finally, the violence of the village revolt, with its basic staplesburning the local archive, unlocking the county jail, and killing
unpopular caciques- had a lineage that can be traced back to the
colonial period. 10
However, a few true novelties connected to the violence of the
revolution deserve some attention. The scale of the killings was
unprecedented, and it reflected in a perverse fashion the depth of
Porfirian progress. The Mexican Revolution was the first Mexican
war in which troops moved massively by rail. It was the first war
funded by a booming export economy (guns for cattle, guns for
DEATH
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oil). It was the first Mexican war that relied heavily on movement
and trade on the U.S. border. It was also the first to use photogra
phy and film as mechanisms of publicity.
Thus, when the agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata was killed in
an ambush in 1919, his body was laid out for public viewing in the
regional capital Cuautla. Rather than destroy or mutilate the body,
as officers would certainly have done a century earlier, General
Gonzalez ordered that the,corpse "be injected and then pho
tographed, and that the pictures be remitted to the capital."" Bet
ter to preserve the body for public identification than to defile it
to horrify the immediate group of spectators. Proof of death was
now mass-mediated. So was proof of power and military strength.
Tbe armies of Pancho Villa and Obregon routinely brought pho
tographers with them, and sometimes film crews, in order to
mobilize public opinion or garner international support. 12
Finally, subtle transformations surrounding political killings
are pertinent to our approach to the history of death in Mexico.
Until the Mexican Revolution, there were two principal ways of
organizing a military execution: hanging, which was carried out
unceremoniously and mainly used to leave a corpse behind as an
object lesson; and execution by firing squad, which often involved
some sort of judgment, and perhaps a moment to pray or even
make a final wish.
In addition to procedural differences, the two forms of execu
tion often indexed distinctions of class or military rank, with the
hanging or casual shooting (or mass firing squad) reserved for the
clases infimas and the rank and file, and the individual execution
before a firing squad generally reserved for notables and officers.
In politically delicate cases, such as the executions of Iturbide and
Guerrero, summary trials and firing squads were organized far
away from the centers of public opinion, but they were still key to
any claim of honor and legality.
During the Mexican Revolution, a relatively new form of execution also achieved notoriety: the political assassination. Porfirio
Diaz's strategy of national appropriation of dead enemies was
well known and well accepted at the time the revolution broke
Figure 9.6. One of Posada's "End of the World" series connected to the 1882 comet.
DEATH
AND
THE
BIOGRAPHY
OF THE NATION
out. It is in part for this reason that presidents and faction leaders
preferred the subterfuge of political assassination to legal execution. Between 1910 and 1929, a good number of presidents, presidential hopefuls, generals, and congressmen were assassinated
rather than shot in battle or before a firing squad: Presidents
Madero, Carranza, and ObregOn; Vice President Pino Suarez;
Generals Pancho Villa, Lucio Blanco, Jesus Carranza, Arnulfo
GOmez, and Francisco Serrano; Congressmen Belisario Dominguez and Francisco Field Jurado, among others.
President Francisco I. Madero and his vice president, Jose
Maria Pino Suoirez, were murdered in 1913 after turning themselves in to Victoriano Huerta's farces, before they even reached
prison. Huerta could not afford to keep them alive, even in prison, but he also did not want to try them or have any official ceremony of execution, so he murdered them, and then claimed that
the president and the vice president had been caught in a crossfire
between presidential guards and army troops. The 1919 killing of
Emiliano Zapata, under President Carranza, did not require this
kind of cover-up. It was a military action, and it was justified as an
act of war and because Zapata had been routinely treated by the
press as a criminal rather than as a general. Exdlsior's headlines
put it thus: "The bloodthirsty leader [cabecilla] fell into a trap that
was ably prepared by General Don Pablo Gonzalez." 13 Zapata's
hideout was referred to as a madriguera (animal's lair) rather than
as a general's headquarters.
Nevertheless, the subterfuge and assassination of Zapata did
taint the Carranza government and put it in an uncomfortable
position when Villa's most prominent general, Felipe Angeles,
was captured and turned in rather than "killed in action:' Friedrich Katz provides a telling analysis of the incident:
By capturing Angeles instead of killing him, Sandoval had created a
difficult dilemma for the Carranza administration. They could not
summarily execute him, as they did with the three men of his escort,
who were immediately shot after their capture. Such an execution
would have further discredited the Carranza administration in the
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REVOLUTION
eyes of Mexican and foreign public opinion. Its image had already
suffered badly as a result of the assassination of Emiliano Zapata only
a few months before:' 14
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REVOLUTION
egy created a visible fault line between state and nation: a distance that was strategically exposed by Carranza's supporters in
their decision to bury him in the third-class section of the municipal cemetery rather than in either the Rotonda de los Hombres
!lustres or one of the city's wealthy cemeteries. Similarly, the
tombs of Madero and Pino Suarez became sites of pilgrimage, and
they were soon dedicated as monuments to the heroes of democracy. Madero's martyrdom was the rallying cry for democrats
throughout the twentieth century, while loyalty to Madero was a
source of prestige in the contest between revolutionary factions
after the assassin Huerta was ousted from the presidency and into
exile. The state's death cult could easily and readily migrate from
the government to the nationalist opposition.
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NATION
[F}reedom of the press for those who cannot read; free elections for
those who do not know the candidates; proper legal proceedings
for those who have never had anything to do with an attorney. All
those beautiful democratic principles, all those great words that gave
such joy to our fathers and grandfathers have lost their magic for the
people, ... [W]ith or without elections, with or without an effective
electoral law, with the Porfirian dktatorship or with Madero's
democracy, with a controlled or a free press, its fate remains the
same as ever. 22
The views of other foreign visitors were not much different, even
in the heyday of Porfirian prosperity. True, foreign commentators
lavished praise on the most visible badges of progress (the railroads; the theaters, paseos, and pavilions; the elegant mounted
police; the bon ton of the cientifico bourgeoisie), but the underbelly of dramatic inequality rarely receded entirely from view.
Thus the anthropologist Frederick Starr, who worked in indigenous communities for years in this period, wrote:
(Indians 1 cannot understand why anyone should come to them
unless he has designs against them. They are afraid of being robbed of
land; they suspect new forms of taxation; they fear that they may be
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REVOLUTION
forced into milit~ry service; they fear lest they be made to labor on
distant plantations for foreign owners. These fears are based upon
old experience, and on the whole are not without foundation. 24
'
In addition-to persistent, and perhaps even growing, inequalities, the idea of refounding the Mexican state on a social compact
was hindered by the institutional weakness of the state itself. As
Fernando Escalante has demonstrated, the weakness of the state
as an institutional structure, and the comparative strength of the
political class, made the citizen an exalted figure of utopian political rhetoric rather than a building block of an actually existing
political order. 25
However, if the construction of the state on the shoulders of
an enlightened citizenry was an incredible fiction to most of Mexico's population, the fantasy of reforming society from the state
seemed more credible, at least to some.
From the wars of independence forward, Mexico, like most of
Spanish America, came to be known beyond its borders principally as a limd of revolution. This was the case to such a degree
that the evolutionism adopted as an official philosophy during the
Porfiriato had an altogether different set of resonances in Mexico
from what it had in Europe or the United States. Rather than a
justification of imperial supremacy and racial hierarchy, Mexican
evolutionism underwrote a program of progressive development
under conditions of peace. The legitimation of racial hierarchy
was in some ways an ancillary benefit (for the elites), but certainly not the ideology's principal attraction: Mexicans had their
own effective, homegrown ideas of social hierarchy that long predated evolutionism. 26
Evolutionism's principal attraction was its rejection of revolution as a viable mechanism of social change. Evolutionary ideas
about race provided a language with which to frame progressivism.
Thus the famous educator Justo Sierra denounced revolution-decades before the publication of his triumphal Mexico, su evoluci6n
social in 1900: "Is the Indian less of a slave? Is the Creole freer? Are
the Indian and the Creole richer? If we had developed in peace,
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OF THE NATION
However, despite the frequency and number of Mexico's socalled revolutions, not one of them had a feature that is a key
characteristic of modern revolutions: not one of them had a "terror." By this I do not mean, of course, that Mexico's nineteenth-
of revolution against a backward society. France under Robespierre is of course the classic example, but the Russian, Chinese,
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REVOLUTION
This has usually been chalked up to the fact that the leadership
of both the liberal and the conservative camps belonged to Mexico's elites. This argument, however, is not convincing: there are
plenty of cases of fratricidal struggle within Mexico's elites before, during, and after the Reforma. The reason for the rapid transition from triumph to reconciliation, with no intervening terror,
is, rather, that the state the liberals conquered did not have the
institutional wherewithal to launch aggressive top-down reforms
of communities and families.
The Mexican state of the 1820s, 1850s, and even 1870s could
not rely on an efficient system of communications within the
country; there were no real national institutions other than the
Church and 'the army, and the army relied heavily on local militias. Civil society, though increasingly organized, was not horizontally integrated to any great extent. As Fran~ois-Xavier Guerra
has convinqngly demonstrated, the central state relied on a precarious and loosely cobbled together network of alliances. 29 It
was no doubt for this reason that triumphant liberals made the
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395
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For example, the anthropologist Manuel Gamio framed revolutionary indiaenismo as a second conquest: "We believe that if
[Latin Americap] governments persist in pressuring and disdaining indigenous.people, as they have done in the past, their failure
will be absolute and irremediable. But if the countries of Central
and South America begin a new conquest of the Indian race, as
Mexico has done, failure will turn into triumphal success." 32
mockery of truth that was idolatry, the Church now misled the
people with the false truths of religion. If Spaniards had instilled
the fear of death and hellfire in order- to create the state, the revolutionary state could only be created by wrenching death from the
hands of false religion. What goes around comes around. If Mexico's state had originally been founded on religion and conquest,
its new state would be erected on science and revolution.
In this matter, Tabasco's Tomas Garrido Canabal was entirely
explicit: "As long as man worships deities and believes in ...
an afterlife, he will remain mentally shackled and the enemy of
his own liberation." 34 Revolutionary "defanatization campaigns"
in Yucatan, Veracruz, Tabasco, Michoac3.n, and Sonora cast the
teacher in the role of priest, the law in the role of God, science in
the role of religion, and work in the role of the religious cult,
while Catholicism now stood in the role of idolatry and superstition. In an uncanny replay of the Spanish conquest, the new state
sought to supplant the old:
sors and enshrine a rational state. The colonial state had been
founded on the idea that Mexicans owed a spiritual debt to their
colonizers, who were therefore owed tribute and privilege. This
spiritual debt was based on trickery, on false religion. Now was
the time to expropriate the heirs of these foreigners and their
new foreign allies.
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Figure 9.9. Alejandro Casarln, "zNo ha concluido aUn el culto a\ dios Huitzilopochtli?" in E/ Padre Cobos:
Peri6dico a/egre, campechano y amante de decir indirectas ... aunque sean directas, March 11, 1869, p. 103.
lithograph, 21.5 x 30.5 em (courtesy of Museo Nacional de Arte).
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these is by Carlos Monsiviis, who, like most contemporary critics, singles out one dimension of Mexican death obsession: "the
Figure 9.10. "Mexico 1913-the Lust for Blood Is Bred in the Bone," in Frederick Starr, Mexico and the
United States: A Story of Revolution, Intervention, and War(Chicago: Bible House, 1914), p. 3.
Paz means here that, unlike earlier Catholic and Aztec practice,
contemporary Mexico did not sublimate death as a sacrifice.
Whereas for Mexico's Indians death was directly tied to fertility,
and whereas for Christians the dead could act as advocates for the
living once they were in heaven, contemporary death was in itself
futile, meaningless.
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Paz's view on the de-eroticization of Mexican death is incomplete, however, and a closer inspection of this matter leads to an
understanding of the ways in which death was culturally elaborated in the postrevolutionary period. Mortuary eroticism has
two principal strands: the first is the attraction that a fusion with
the earth or with timelessness ("eternity") holds in the face of
life's suffering. This "fatal attraction" also involves the sense of
transgression that comes with taking one's leave of the imperious
dictates of the living. The second form of mortuary eroticism is
the sublimation of death in ideas of transcendence. Whereas the
first form portrays death as a release, the second dwells on the
power over life attained after death.
Paz's argument focuses on the second form of eroticism: his
main point is that the "solitary Mexican" of the late 1940s left the
Indian and the baroque Catholic worlds behind but had not yet
embraced modernity as a project of his own. As a result, "the Mexican" could not construct his own transcendence. Because he had
no future, and because the Christian afterlife was sinking in the
cultural horizon, sacrifice had ceased to be anything but a futile
gesture: "the Mexican" had nothing to sacrifice for, no belief in the
afterlife, no wholehearted embrace of modernity. This is what Paz
meant when he claimed that death in Mexico lacked eroticism.
Paz thus framed his argument on death in connection to
socially dominant ideas regarding the future, and his statement in
fact does not touch the first form of eroticism described above
(death as release). His diagnosis was that at the time of his writing
(the late 1940s), Mexicans were still insufficiently committed to
modernism, to its universalist potential, to have built an image of
a collective future worth sacrificing for. In this context, familiarity with death was both the result of Spanish and indigenous traditions and the effect of a lingering tradition that refused to die
but could no longer live.
A literary representation of this condition can be found in the
works of Juan Rulfo, particularly in his story "Luvina," about a
town that is a waiting room for death. 43 Its inhabitants live suspended in a timeless vigil, kept in place only by the claims of their
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REVOLUTION
dead. The dead, with their bllnd passions, have made_ life sterile
for the living, and in the fa-ce of this sterility death has become
insignificant, "lacking in eroticism," as Paz would have it.
In Pedro Pciramo, Rulfo's protagonist, Juan Preciado, returns to
Comala, his hometown, to seek out his father, the cacique Pedro
Paramo. Unlike Luvina, whose inhabitants are waiting for death,
Comala is populated entirely l;>y ghosts, all of whom are the chil
dren and the women of Pedro Paramo. Juan Preciado's return to
his father, to his home village, is itself death. It is also the discovery
of a community founded on what I called "negative reciprocity";
founded on rape, on elopement, on murder; founded on the universal paternity of the cacique Pedro Paramo, on the loose identification between half brothers, between bastard children and
spurned lovers. life both in Luvina and in Comala is suspended in
the present. Not even death can awaken it. Like purgatory, the present is a prison. In this, the Mexican death obsession of the early
and mid-twentieth century is distinct from the dominant colonial
model. In Rulfo's writings, there is no future, even in death. 1bus,
for both Paz and Rulfo, the weight of history is a fetter to life.
A comparable issue is explored by Eraclio Zepeda, a writer
from Chiapas, in his story "Benzulul" (1959), where the Indian
Benzulul feels that he will never rest, not even in death, if he keeps
his Indian name. Only if he takes the name of the ladino cacique
EncarnaciOn Salvatierra will his soul find peace: "EncarnaciOn Salvatierra is gonna die good. He's not going to wander at night. He's
not going to be haunting; he's not going to be crying. He's got a
name! "44 In this story, Benzulul seeks the more modest form of
mortuary eroticism that I identified: death as a release from life's
travails. Yet the character fears that if he keeps his Indian name, his
soul will continue to wander; not even death will release him.
Benzulul changes his name to Salvatierra, but upon hearing of this,
the cacique hangs him dead. For trying to change his station and
future, Benzulul dies like an Indian.
Two facts are significant in all this: first, the sense that a break
with the past was necessary in order to have a life that included a
future; second, that the dead, that the past, still held the living
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firmly in their clutches. That the countryside is the primary location of the dead is also significant. The Labyrinth '!f Solitude, El
llano en llamas, Pedro Pciramo, and even "Benzulul" were all written at a time when urbanization in Mexico, though rampant, was
still incipient. Mexico's lack of commitment to modernity could
be experienced as a disproportionate weight of the countryside
on the nation as a whole.
Looked at from this perspective, the generation of the 1960s,
always suspicious of the older generation's sublimation of things
Mexican, had more in common with Paz and Rulfo than they
often cared io admit. The light touch of the so-called aeneracion
de la onda is in certain respects the triumphal moment of urbanized modernity, of a Mexico that was no longer buried under the
weight of its dead.
What these writers lacked in historical gravitas, they made up
for in their breathless discovery of the new urban metropolis.
Free at last from the clutches of History, with its solemn custodians all dressed in black, this generation could, at last, turn its back
on necrophilia and celebrate other forms of eroticism: girls of the
Palacio de Hierro, Acapulco playboys, rock and roll, or, in more
proletarian versions, the Mexican cumbia and the jotonovela, with
feminine curves protruding out of every frame. For the generation of the 1960s, intellectual parricide was the only way to
accede to their rightful inheritance: the construction of new lives,
with new meanings, with new futures, required a break with the
master narrative of Mexican history, a narrative that had, for the
most part, been created only to call for its own destruction.
Mexican consumer culture was so voracious, and its embrace
of modernization so joyous, that it 'Yas capable even of consuming
Mexican death obsession, presented no longer as Dionysian popular revolt, or as the blind and deaf brutality of history, but rather
as a curiosity, an icon of identity. The new intellectual generation's suspicion of death obsession as mere invention, as an illintended distortion of revolutionary popular culture in favor
either of tourism or of the Mexican state, is a distortion but not
an invention.
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The source of the misconception th~t Paz, Rulfo, and the rest
of them were engaged prirtcipally in inventing Mexican curios
can perhaps be discovered through a very one-sided examination
of the early work'of Carlos Fuentes, a writer who was caught
between this generation and the iconoclastic generation of the
1960s and whose work is frequently guided by totalizing impulses. Riding on the tail of the revolutionary wave, Fuentes
aspired to put together an encompassing narrative of Mexican culture. Rather than restrict his exploration to his own subject position (as later writers of la onda such as Gustavo Sainz and ] ose
Agustin did), and rather than write about a people he knew
closely (as Rulfo and Rosario Castellanos did), Fuentes took in the
whole of Mexico, in a play of generations, classes, and regions;45
In Fuentes's La regiOn mds transparente, this historical synthesis
finds its climax in a collective death scene. In Mexico City, on the
eve of Independence Day, the revolution dies- "Llegas en el
momenta en que se abren en Mexico todas las posibilidades de la
fortuna personal; la revoluci6n estci enterrada"- and it dies in an
explosion of death and spent hopes, betrayal and fireworks. Independence Day is thus observed by the individual deaths of various
characters in the novel, and becomes itself a kind of wake for the
Mexican Revolution. The dead, in short, are no longer the remainder or result of the historical process; they become, instead,
its symptom or sign.
In Rulfo's work, the violence of history, its overwhelming
power, is lived experience, not "the Revolution" as it was told in
political proclamations or history books. Indeed, the revolution as
such is not directly mentioned in Rulfo's works. What we have
instead is a world inhabited by ghosts (in Pedro Paramo) or by
villagers who refuse to live, who refuse to leave (in "Luvina").
Readers in Mexico City may identify these specters with the revolutionary process, but Rulfo refrained from doing this and stuck
to constructing a delirious world of experience.
In Fuentes, on the contrary, the dead stand in for the weight
of the national myth itself. Death is the diaanostic sian of the
national myth, a sign of its continued vitality. Thus the climactic
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4"